any geography is hard, the skin ends where the skin ends
by flesh and bone telephone
Summary: "Love isn't brains, Caroline." — There are things that the body doesn't forget, even when the heart pretends to sleep and shut its ears. — [Klaus, Stefan, Caroline. Klaroline] For Hannah.


**disclaimer:** i don't own anything. ALSO, ANY POETRY YOU RECOGNIZE HERE IS FROM FAMOUS, _HOUSE-HOLD_ (IN THE POETRY COMMUNITY, AT LEAST) NAME AUTHORS THAT A LOT OF YOU PROBABLY ALREADY RECOGNIZE IF YOU'RE HUGE DORKS WHO READ MORE THAN JUST RICHARD SIIKEN. A LOT OF THE SHIT STEFAN SAYS (WHICH I WROTE FOR HIM) IS POETRY_ WRITTEN BY OTHER PEOPLE_. I MENTION THAT **CLEARLY** WHEN HE SPEAKS, THAT ALL THE BULLSHIT HE SPILLS IS NOT HIS (OR MINE) TO SPILL. THAT SHIT TALKER. IKR. NOW YOU KNOW. I AM NOT CAPABLE OF ALL THAT SOULFULNESS AND CLEVERNESS, SORRY TO DISAPPOINT. I'M DISAPPOINTED TOO. _**I DID NOT WRITE ANY OF THE POETRY WRITTEN BY OTHER PEOPLE IN THIS FIC. ESPECIALLY THE TITLE, AND THE SHORT SENTENCE TIDBITS FOUND BETWEEN SOME LINE BREAKS. THANK YOU, MAY YOU BE BURDENED WITH GLORIOUS PURPOSE.**_  
**dedication: **sit down children, let me tell you a story. yes, this is one of those phenomenally long author's notes, but this is a phenomenally long story (over 50k) that was initially supposed to be a one shot for hannah's birthday except that i've decided to break it up into two/three chapters. so length considering, i think some words explaining are deserved. i love klaroline, and you love klaroline, and in little more than a year we've had a lot of shit thrown at us, all of it undeserved. now i was seriously bummed out for a long time, i'd had so much love for this ship, poured in so much heart, and to be so unceremoniously shut down after all the promises the writers made us? it was demoralizing. i couldn't really read fic, i couldn't really write, i couldn't even review all the wonderful work put out there. i've had at least three multi chapter fics pending because of the depressing 'end' of this ship. tvd is a shit show, TO is a shit show, and to blame ratings on Klaroliners and at the same time try to raise ratings by baiting us with 'mentions' or 'crossovers' is low.  
what i'm saying is that a lot of us were bummed out, where was our grand epic love? remember JoMo, the captain of our ship? he jumped off, and everyone sort of just shafted us to the side. now i've raged and wept a lot on my blog under the tag 'disillusionment' and if you want an earful of pessimism and weeping, go there. i'm not going to use this fic as a platform to discuss the issues with both shows and the cast/crew, so please let's not discuss that in reviews (if you're so kind to leave one), let's just forget about that. there's a lot of negative energy and hurt in everything associated with that - which is basically what this fic is for. to bring that up, and purge it out, hopefully.  
i couldn't have given up even if i wanted to, not with melissa, hannah and all the wonderful (but garbage) people on tumblr on my dash. for a long while i was sad, and then i was furious. hell hath no fury, right? and what i'm trying to say is this fic might not make sense, a lot of you might be reading and then go 'huh, she's saying this in one paragraph but didn't she say something completely different in another one?' or 'everyone is OOC and nothing makes sense', and that's fine. this fic doesn't have to make sense, it's okay if it contradicts itself. i don't need it to be a perfect lyrical flow with a stellar organised story-line, most of the real love letters aren't. i needed some place to bury my love of klaroline, some place to also coax it back to life, and this is it. this is the fic.  
not all of you will agree with anything that i write, but i haven't written something like this since 'like oranges' - it's an outpour of everything i ever felt about this pairing and their dynamic that not all of you might necessarily agree with, or interpret the same way as i did. i don't know.. it just happened. i couldn't write anything else, not really. not with this crawling around in my head, torturing me emotionally, growing on my laptop and loitering there sometimes. i've been working on this for five months, haltingly, doggedly, despairingly. and maybe it's not my finest work, but i'd like to think it's one of my most honest.  
so here it is, a love letter. a love letter to me, to you, to everyone whoever felt the things that resonated with klaroline, with tvd too. maybe it's an ending, maybe it's a beginning, but it's something. A love letter whose heart is Hannah. it's a confirmation that i won't stop shipping these people. so it's a come back of sorts. as always fic wouldn't have been possible without Hannah, and without Melissa, and with the graphics I go to gaze at on ishi's blog, the merciless klaroline meta that evie posts, and several wonderful people - it wouldn't have been possible without all the heartache thrown at us, and it wouldn't have been possible without all the wonderfully inspirational writers, graphic makers, meta writers and just general fans. all of you guys keeping up the spirit and spreading the love, and holding on. thank you anyone who's read my stuff, recced my stuff, followed me - it takes a lot to put up with me, and i tend to disappear a lot on you all. thank you for the kind words, and for shipping what you ship in the face of the plague. that takes heart.  
i'd like to let everyone know that, as always, this is all hannah's fault - she had once demanded (though she's forgotten, so i hope this fic is a lovely surprise) a continuation of a prompt hannah had given me a long time ago. hannah prompted this. and so i answered. i went back to school, i tried to learn what was being taught, but my mind kept drifting back to this. damn. prompt. so i realized that it had to be continued. so sorry, the tumblr had a 'deathcab for cutie' ending, but this once is a continuation. i don't know if i did it justice, i just know that i did it. it has to be enough. hannah is my rock in all things, and this is my thank you to her for everything, because i don't think there's anyone in the world with so much realness, such heart wrenching earnestness, such hope. please go wish her a happy birthday. she's twenty!  
**warning: **you don't need warnings, you don't fear the unknown. live dangerously.  
**about my style:** everybody in the club goes wild wild wild – I know that you like my style – but actually, the complete discordance in writing tenses is a cool thing of mine. No, it's not because I cannot comprehend grammar or tone, just go with it. The clusterfuck of tenses is completely intentional. I promise that I totally know how punctuation and sentence structure works, I'm just being brilliantly reckless with both of them. It is brilliance, I know exactly what I'm talking about. No, I do know what I'm doing, shut up. It is artistic, fuck you okay.  
**notes:** i have a lot of feelings about klaroline, especially when it comes to a possible reunion - years later. and caroline maybe not being as indifferent as she would like to be able to pretend. (also inspired and based on a shit ton of poetry, like a shit _ton_.)  
**also to note:** I have a very strong suspicion that Hannah was also the driving force behind getting the drabble this spawned from in the klaroline awards. i'm very humbled by everyone who nominated or voted for me. now that voting is closed i feel i can confidently post this too.  
**as always:** unbetad. if any of you are very precise about grammar and spelling i'm sorry about my fics, i don't have a beta, and don't really know how to go about getting one since i'm not patient enough for the whole process of getting it read through. so i'm sorry. i've gone over this four times to edit it myself, if something manages to escape my net of correction powers, then i'm sorry. also there is always a disharmony between the tenses when i write, might be peculiar or uncomfortable for some, but it's how i've always written klaroline. just seems to be so. like i said, this fic is over 50k, i'd recommend sitting down with it for a while, or breaking it up in increments. if you get bored in some parts i totally understand.

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_"there are some people who touch you as if you are beautiful, and at times that is the most unbearable thing that you can feel._ And there are some people who are so much that you can't look at them without feeling as if every nerve is pushing out of your body to try to touch his synapses, _and you can't tell if your body is betraying your heart or your heart is betraying your skin."_

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* * *

It isn't fair. She isn't supposed to have her heart crack behind her tongue, beating too hard, and too fast - she isn't supposed to allow him this. The tips of her fingers feel cold, the air skating her nape has teeth.

No one notices. Table set perfect precision, the cloth inches above her hands, the silverware old antique crystal matched with plates as thin as slivers of mother of pearl. The chandelier glows above the quiet tinkle of glass and quiet, pretty conversation. Caroline shakes off her own long drawn out silence before anyone remarks her as odd to turn to the vampire next to her, an old French aristocrat who claims he'd tailored for Marie Antoinette one decade, and charmingly dictatorial Bonaparte the next.

_He isn't really as small as they say,_ He winks, _not where it counts._

She laughs, it pleases him. Alarming how someone so old and so fashionable can still find opportunity to be so tasteless. It's all powdered lies and crystal pretty pretense underneath the weight of Klaus's scrutiny pinning her heart to the ground. Caroline - Caroline, she's _good _at pretending, she'd had to become good at pretending, but under his eyes from the other end of the table…she feels paper thin, a breath and she'll tear. He _knows_ her. He could tell her from her performance as easily as he could tell her from a painting, a sketch, the painstaking (but never detailed, _oh no, you can't be pinned, darling. Not so precisely_) scrawl of charcoal over yellow paper.

Caroline wishes he would stop looking at her. He's being very sneaky about it, no one notices it, he doesn't look at her directly, but he talks with others, addresses others, just as she does. Neither of them have said a word to each other all evening, not in twenty years, not since he'd had her clawing at his broad gold-river back, at his damned golden hair, at dark black earth as he licked and nipped and cursed fervent sermons between her thighs that knocked molten bolts of madness between the notches of her spine and left her screaming to some deeper, older God. Was there anything older than him? Than Niklaus and the electric suck of history between his wide, red-with-slaughter mouth?

He's a very good liar, and he's still remembering his talent for discretion, one that had all those years ago seemed painfully absent when it came to her. It's insane, his mouth is made for expressions, for constant animation - to turn wrathful, to sour scowls, to spring apart with churlish grins. It is strange to observe him as a stranger, to ignore him, to pretend with the rest that she knows him only as a country knows its oldest king, gone away for so long, now received with solemn, civil celebration to welcome him back. She is Caroline Forbes, recently made Vampire - and he is the Original Hybrid. As far as anyone is concerned none of them have ever met, and she has no right to speak of him, and he has no interest in speaking to her.

He is so good at keeping his distance to keep her safe that she almost believes he doesn't care. Believing would be easier, if she'd actually met his eyes to confirm it. But it knocks the air out of her, the thought of actually engaging him - there's too much she hasn't said, too much she is angry over that she doesn't (in hindsight) _deserve_ to be angry about. Which, paradoxically, only insanely makes her angrier. Neither of them owed each other anything, did they? He promised her the world several times and she refused him. He promised to be her last love, and he promised never to see her again. They fucked in the woods once, like mindless savages, and she swears she can _still_ feel the imprint of teeth where thigh dips into tender bruising flesh, where it hurts in an aching, painful, blue-green-with-old-want way.

She wondered for a while too, where he'd fucked Hayley. But such things made her bitter, and confused her, and they made her angry - because she had no right to be angry, and she had no right to feel _betrayed._

So she'd tucked it away, neurotic Caroline, compartmentalizing her feelings. It makes her a filthy hypocrite for all those times she'd warned Stefan about things like this, and he'd frown and sigh and she wouldn't dare drop the E-word, not even after all these years. She didn't know if she should wish he was here and not cavorting in Milan with a slew of Peruvian prostitutes he'd befriended eons ago. She didn't know if it would have been easier to pretend that they were all strangers if he'd been here.

The old hurt swims up, the old want, a cocktail of betrayal, and past (but no less _poor_)decisions, and anger at bad-timing, and a horrific, foolish lack of _preparation_. Klaus's promises were especially binding. When he said he'd never see her again, he'd meant _never._

Yet here he is, surrounded by the Vampire aristocracy, the immortal gentry, tucked at far ends of the table in different company that is alive and talking, arguing over Struensee and Nietzsche and how the man with the bright red hair had once been bored enough to pretend to be a Priest just so he could fool around with an Empress, and teared down the aristocracy in the process. (_Abominable!_ One woman chastises, aghast. _You must find better things to do, dear. Now Russia was the last real royalty, none of this tiffy British nonsense. Pretenders the lot of them. The war of the roses would have ended quite differently if I hadn't been occupied in Spain. I guarantee you that_).

They raise their glasses, the bright haired man leads the toast, over the tear of an orchestra, the swim of a troop of violinists in the next room. He thanks their highly esteemed guest for attending, bearing his teeth in a pithy grin that bleeds of an amused acknowledgement for the necessary kowtowing to the established food chain.

No one particularly likes Klaus, but the older vampires have come to appreciate the pecking order, the importance of age, and centuries under one's belt, they offer the same respect that the younglings would offer them. And the younger ones would do well to fear, if they cannot learn respect. Klaus has very sharp, very deadly teeth, they learn that he likes to smile with them a lot.

The priest hollers out grandly his blessings. _Bless the newbies, bless the young fangs and the newly teethed_, and they clink the crystal and promise a bountiful eternity.

Eternity. She looks at Klaus, as everyone in the room does, as only a young vampire in a crowd of siblings would look towards a father than has been absent for very long. A subject in a field of subjects. Everyone holds their breath. And then slowly, slowly, Klaus mouth _moves._

His smile slices over one cheek, pulling it in a golden fold, of pleased, superior satisfaction. Beautiful and terrible. The dim intimate light tints everything in low, secretive whispers, how everyone holds their breath to see how they have been received. If their flattery will be rewarded, or if it has tempted his infamous wrath.

_He's as temperamental as an October gale,_ a vampire who'd escaped New Orleans once muttered to all of them in a sleepy pub in Prague - and all she could think about, like a whirring reel spinning dizzy through her even in sleep - all Caroline could _think_ about was the whip of bright orange leaves, and the diamond shards she'd breathed in that day long ago, when the rushed, breathless hours had bled day into night and he'd buried himself in her like a vicious bullet that didn't breach out of her, but stuck and _stuck_, and despite all her mental surgery, her painstaking analysis, her deep, violent hours of thought and rationalization, she could still feel him raw in her side, beneath flesh, beneath bone, beneath mutilated heart - the hard, stubborn reminder of him. _Your last, your last, your last_ - and his name broke in her throat, diamond shards stinging now, still there, in a cold, bright choke. He could not be removed, and on that day he would not be denied.

Klaus meets her eye, and she swears it's like he's trying to cut her heart out of her. It's only a glance, looking around the table, addressing them all. It's only a perfunctory second, but a whole history lunges behind her ribs, a whole fire scorches over her skeleton, the tongue of him remembered as fresh and new and merciless as all righteous hell.

Glass breaks, a thousand cathedral rupturing in her ear drums. A cataclysm of colored, bold glass. It's only the Victorians hurling their glasses at the wall in great, triumphant hurrah. Caroline flinches, struck out from an underwater dream and his molten stare slides away, to the next, to the next, to the next. A scuffle breaks out, the Vampire next to her stops being coy about doing the horizontal tango with members of the French royalty and starts screaming about six hundred year old silverware. _You heathens, you bloody Neanderthals_ - and he slips into whipping, furious french about irreplaceable history.

The others don't take too well, and there's all a holler and jumble of tongues in the air, from Gaellic, to the buried dusty grate of the Mesopotamia like broken mosaic shards, like clumsily shot arrows, furious philosophy about the importance of the material clanging sharply with less civilized claims.

Those who are rather indifferent to the matter begin to withdraw but Klaus sits back on his chair in interest, eyes warm with bored-amusement. Lounging like the King he is. His face alight, his posture giddy, deceptively young, drawn ready to spring into a game. That's what fights still are to him, even now, _games_.

Caroline rises too, pats Francois consolingly on the chest and slips discretely out of the room.

She doesn't have to look back. There are several feet between them still, when she is away, when the dining room doors with the priceless cherry wood paneling sweep behind her and she does not hear them shut, does not hear them slip back into the door frame. She feels as if his fingers, pulse gold at the tips of them, are a breath away from her lower back. From the dip of her backless dress, shivering breathlessly over her spine like that night long ago when he'd spun her over the music, complimented her dancing and never once taken his eyes off her, _I know_. He'd said, like it was nothing, prompt as the undiluted truth. _I know_

Caroline doesn't dare turn around to look at him. For all his talk of hummingbirds, there is a riot of them beating themselves to death in her chest.

If she says his name it'll break in her throat, and she'll be lost. He won't be denied.

Klaus slips back on her trail like he would into the steps of an old remembered dance, once more recalled. So she goes on, and in the dark of her silence, he follows her anyway.

* * *

_Now tell me dear._

One of his hands span wide on the earth. A thumb skims the strap of her top when she slips it on, she pulls it up twice, and a nudge of his thumb, a _nudge_, and it slides back down her skin like a slithering raindrop.

_Now tell me dear -_

What is Klaus saying? Her clothes are unsalvageable. Allowing her her dignity in the aftermath would have been intolerable to him. She can't concentrate on getting dressed with his thumb skimming her shoulder, with his _touching_ her. Goosebumps prickling in the trail he leaves behind, _now tell me dear_ - hot and wet, dragging her leaf rattled hair from her skin, and when he says the words she feels the scrape of a canine, the wicked moist plume of his breath, the red edge of his tongue. _Now tell me dear -_

Caroline closes her eyes, her body aching in an entirely newer way, feeling the starts of a new wave. Her body feels like it's been through a meat grinder, and someone's shot tranquilizers into her, drowsy and aching. She feels like if he says another word - what? _What is he saying?_ - she'll explode, like magic paper, like a strand of magnesium, and her name topples out of his mouth, set to turn her into brilliant, _brilliant_ white light. _Now tell me dear -_

She slumps back. She should move away from that mouth, the gust of his unintelligible worlds. It's done. Let her enjoy it? The warm afterglow? Night's already shivering down and she doesn't have any clothes _left_. The only warm thing is his mouth against her spine, his thumb putting tongues of fire over the curved blade of her shoulder, little lizard hissing tongues as night shivers down. His other hand props him behind her, pressed into the earth next to her quivering thigh. She's sat up, cold quickly turning her alert, not quick enough, because he's turned into her, _Now tell me dear -_

His hand on the earth, innocuous. But a shift and he could slide them back on her.

His knuckles might as well be ridged with the metal bumps of a duster. They're dangerous to her.

Caroline squeezes her eyes tight and she waits - teeth digging down into her lip, points impatiently pricking for blood - she waits for the showerfall of stars, that white magnesium flare. Black behind her lids, black and dark, and Klaus's _voice_.

A part of her recognizes that he's speaking to more than her, more than one part of her. Quietly, gently then suddenly, the rasp of scaly underbelly, a snake sweeping through a dirt strewn floor. Waiting to sink its teeth. Not yet. Not now. _Now tell me dear._

Caroline never wins. Not really. Not for long.

_Have you had your fill?_

* * *

Sand grits between her fingers and Stefan gamely lets his girls bury him alive. _His_ girls.

Caroline comes upon them in Monaco. They're giggling wildly, plastic shovels in hand, piling pure white beach over Stefan's body. Cheekily doing more than that too. The pitched umbrella shades his face, a thatched hat squashed on his chest with a castle turret growing around the band of it.

They look up when Caroline arrives, know who she is. She's come upon similar scenarios before, whether it's body shots in Minnesota or being buried alive in Europe, they're game. _Stefan's_ game. Any tourist looking upon them would wonder at the odd grouping, one Caucasian man and a slew of young, pretty eyed girls who don't speak a lick of English.

They miss no beat in showing her the bucket they've got on hand, and Caroline wordlessly sits with them, crossing her legs. She wishes she had their enthusiasm, their perfectly glazed tans. As hairless and lovely as girls in a top shelf magazine. She wishes she could have even a thimble-full of that airy, world-drunk happiness.

This is what Stefan's been doing recently; plucking up lovely girls and partying it up. It's supernatural philanthropy and a way to take up his time, really. She doesn't completely approve, but the girls know what they're doing. They _like_ Stefan. Sometimes they cheer and cajole him, kiss him noisily on the cheek, show him a lemon slice and they beg him to be a sport. Stefan can deny them nothing - denies them the least he'd ever denied anyone.

Then Stefan would pin the lemon on his fangs, hissing dramatically at them, and they'd shriek with laughter. The display would always end with them tracing the black veins with their pretty fingers, chattering admiringly among themselves.

Stefan looks like a flat pile of earth. They've worked fast. One of them's pinned his arm down by sitting on it and Stefan allows it, likes the wiggling bottom. He's really an utter pervert, but Caroline allows this too. Stefan and his girls, and her and Stefan and Stefan's girls. This too will pass, eventually.

The two Peruvians smooth handfuls of sand over his arms, slap some on his covered chest, pat it down to keep it together. Stefan's allowance of this treatment might have something to do with patient, benevolent amusement and fond tolerance, but Caroline has a feeling that it's also got a lot to do with the face that his blood is currently 110% corkscrew nipples.

They giggle and it's lovely, really. It's a fantasy world, a scene out of a pin up. They know what Caroline and Stefan are, but _oh no_, they don't seem to_ mind_. The third Peruvian throws a shadow over Caroline's shoulder as she arrives from the bar, gives her a smile and a little glass of something clear, white, and very bad for her liver. Caroline's lack of enthusiasm has been noted, then the girl sits down by her, knees bumping.

She wonders sometimes if Stefan really knows any of their names. If she should be disgusted that this is how he amuses himself, or relieved. Foreign girls and booze, it's better than the bloodier alternative.

He slurs her name.

Caroline perks up, mouth straightens out of its sober slump. "Yeah?"

"You're back?"

The girl sitting on his arm shrieks, scattering away from his hand and clutching at her companion. She widens her eyes at Caroline, delightfully aghast at her Stefan's behavior, she's nattering on in her language and Caroline cracks a grin behind her glass, sets it aside.

Caroline can't really frown anymore, these girls have a delight that's rather infectious about them. She gathers sand in her hand, very fine and white. It feels like powdered glass. "Yep."

She smacks it into his hair, Stefan - to his credit - doesn't react very much, he splutters and Caroline stoically accepts her Hi-5's from the rest of the girls as they whoop and holler at her daring.

His lips are stuck with white grits. Powdered glass, salt on the rim of a tequila glass. He licks them and blinks twice behind his glasses before speaking, admiringly level. "Wanna talk about it?"

* * *

This is the truth; She doesn't need him. She's never needed him.

So she's never sat down, slumped in the corner of some part of a city and missed him like _that_. She remembers a man, young, quiet-eyed, soft like a held-hard prayer, on her. Eyes on _her_. She remembers incredulity that no one else understood, and _fear_, and the undeniable understanding that comes between two people, when like recognizes like.

She remembers battle lines being drawn, and champagne. Was that all that is was? Champagne, and waltzes, and elegant barbs?

The heat of his stare, her boldness like a pearl in her own throat, heady and powerful. His tolerance never forced, his love all awe.

Was that what she missed, being _worshiped?_

It wasn't just worship though, was it? It might have been at first. Until it wasn't. Until it was too filthy to pretend at divinity, too deeply felt to be immortally raised. Too complex to hand her a halo, and to extend her ankle for him to kiss. It was all skewed. He loved her, he loved her, _he loved her._

And she'd hated him for it, at the time. Maybe she still hates him for it even now. Quietly, like a secret. She hated that no one had loved her before, that she'd gone through life feeling like a shadow. She'd stretched her heart, waited for the brutal snap, and then _he_ came along - waltzed into their one pony town, told her how beautiful she was, how strong she was. And she didn't want to hear all those things come out of _him_, she didn't want to be dazzled by them.

It wasn't fair that he was the one who loved her, that he was the worst person to begin to _decide_ to. She'd though, _no_, there's no chance in _hell_, it's_ morally reprehensible_. And she'd wondered if this was her luck, that the _one time_ a boy told her something that filled her up with light, it was the one she could never allow herself to love.

Love? What a word. When Klaus looked at her it was like being seen after years spent in interminable _darkness._

She doesn't remember him with bitterness, not often anyway. Over time when the world had become bigger than Mystic Falls, everyone went to their own corner, and the past became almost...ephemeral. All that old blood, those feuds that had burnt so fiercely, so destructively on those grounds...She'd remember him sometimes fondly, bitter-sweet, like hard ground coffee over Turkish Delight.

Doesn't mean she looked for him. She avoided any meeting _industriously_, made sure to make trips only _after_ calculating the risk of ever bumping into him and finding that risk in the lower percentage. She calculated, knowing that if he wanted to 'bump' into her, he'd do it, no matter _how_ she might plan.

She knew inevitably that they might meet again.

She didn't think about what would happen or _how_ it would happen, but she'd smile when she thought of the threat of it. She'd muse that it might be interesting, and not think about it anymore than that, not think any further. It would happen years too late, after all.

_One day,_ she'd thought. _One day I'll come upon him, maybe like Ozymandias._ Battered king, stone feet cut at the knee, the pedestal worn away by sand, by bruising winds. Nature did not care for kings.

Maybe so much time would have passed that they'd have no memory of ever knowing each other. She'd think, _I've met you somewhere, haven't I?_

And maybe after blinking, struck - jaw slightly agape, mirroring the old wonder - he'd echo the sentiment.

* * *

She doesn't say his name, same way that Stefan doesn't say Elena's. She unearths her best friend from the beach and he dusts himself off. He's wearing luridly bright billabongs, and the girls whine and moan, pout, but let her lead him away in good heart. Stefan's like their big toothless lion, their circus cat. _Papa Leon_ they like to kiss him, sit on his lap, and touch Caroline's pretty hair.

Their chatter fades away, water laps, light springs off the surface and breaks within. Diamond shards of white trapped and glittering in the water, when it ebbs lazily over her toes it's a wonder it doesn't cut her to pieces.

Stefan's elbow bumps into hers. Normally she'd start small talk with a comment about his reddening back, about sun screen. Caroline watches him from the corner of her eyes, she _should_ joke shouldn't she? Joke about how many people he'd had to compel to get a private beach that he could really just have paid for if he wanted,_ you know._

Light glances off the jaw that set of a thousand modelling contracts (all sensibly refused, of course), but these days Stefan looks almost boneless, in the way he moves, his way of letting silences go on and _on_. It's not apathy, and he hasn't 'turned it off', it's not angst, it's not devil-may-care, but there's a certain lazy boldness in him these days that makes it look like he won't burn the next contract offer that comes his way. Like with his Peruvian girls he might want to experience newer, not always sensible things.

No one has to speak the names, but no one has to, do they?

Light springs off his shades. Stefan had shaken off the sand and squished his hat onto her head, her golden hair caught in the thatch, before he'd ambled off. Sand sticks to his arms, his skin blooming red and fading as healing kicks in.

Caroline peels the hair from the back of her neck, her bolero left wherever he'd dumped his shirt, her dress skimming above her knees, and Stefan finally, _finally_ cocks her a nod. Noting something, _confirming_ it, like she's come back changed, and he's seen how.

"How terrible was it?"

They're at the edge now. Stefan stops, cools his feet in the water. Hands on his hips, his chest slathered in sand, still managing to be a force of grave, grave gravity. She keeps quiet for a while, unsure as to how to proceed. It's difficult to put words to things she doesn't yet know how to feel, and Stefan jerks his head again. Tongue pressing the inside of his cheek, light springing out the light brown in his dark hair as he considers the water. Brown like the golden notes left behind in the grained paneling of the balustrade down the staircase back home.

"Huh," He wiggles his toes in the wet sand. "Okay. Is the worst over?"

Caroline lifts her shoulders, her skin broiling beneath the sunlight. It's aggressively sunny today. She should be _enjoying_ it, she should be shoving him into the water, she should be at the bar letting the bartender flirt with her, watching Stefan's girls tackle him and watching Stefan _letting_ them. She shouldn't feel the hard dig of words in her throat, right behind her tongue. They catch, and hook, and it takes _everything_ for them to come out of her.

"That's the thing," Caroline shrugs, "Nothing happened."

Stefan looks up then, with the angle of the light melting her back, fusing to his shades in white bursts...she can't see his eyes. She can't see exactly how his thoughts pass through them, she can't tell what he's thinking, and she feels like she's launched her heart off the tip of some precipice and it's hanging in the air, waiting for the dreadful plummet, for gravity to kick in. For the falling. And really, there's no keeping one's dignity when it comes to such a fall.

Stefan looks up and Caroline's mouth wobbles, lip gloss sticky, feeling smaller, feeling Stefan _see_ her feeling smaller.

"Nothing happened." He echoes slowly. He sounds like her mother, repeating something silly she said back to her. _You stayed out after curfew because it was a 'matter of life or death'?_ or _What do you mean you can't tell me who's been buying you all these scarves_? or _Caroline, that's no reason to lie to me_ - a muscle in his jaw jumps. "Care, this is - this is _Klaus_."

She almost flinches, she hasn't heard that name for... for so long - _Stefan's never said that name_.

Caroline looks down, her own weakness pains her. "Yep." She remarks, cheerfully - cheerful like plum pink, too-sticky lip gloss, like her pretty sundress, like the photo in her wallet of Bonnie and Elena screaming '_Cheeeeeeeeeeese!'_ at the camera. Smiles big, posture tight, snappy like a rubber band. Springing like a dancer over the stage.

Like she can't remember blood flooding down her throat like liquid sunlight. Like she can't remember the old touches, the searing mouth, because they've become brittle, brittle ghosts. _Nothing happened. _"That's the problem."

* * *

They meet again, though that word itself does nothing justice. Because despite the fever flush of her whole body, drawn tighter than cat string shrieking beneath the seething fiddle, a single prompt from the inevitable, final _snap_ - Because despite the way his eyes weigh on her all the way through, make the marrow of her hollower than papyrus reeds, hollower than his damned insistent pipe dreams, lighter than feckle pollen gusting away on a single, clean breath, squeezing them vein to vein - _despite_ how she feels; lightheaded, asphyxiated from the sheer proximity and the insurmountable distance too; it doesn't matter, _it doesn't matter -_

Because she doesn't turn around, and _he doesn't call for her._

* * *

So it had happened, what now? Her hotel room, his smile sinking her. Her thoughts keep turning into birds, blinding plumage, flying away.

The distance between them, years and time unraveling where one existed independent without the other, and then the closeness suddenly, the heart-sinking _proximity._

The anticipation of the gun shot only for the jam of the bullet in the barrel, and then _realizing_ after that - realizing the silence she'd draped over that close, claustrophobic space where she was torn between panic and euphoria, between pride and fear, between relentless self-doubt, searing longing, the breaths of her blue - the _closeness_, the engulfing distance had diminished her. Realizing, _knowing_ that if she looked back... _if she looked back _he'd appear before her - before she could even finish the turn, her body knocking into the swallowing proximity of his, hinged on a battle that could go either way. Who, between the two of them, would devour the other? And who would be willing to allow it?

Somehow she'd felt like a fugitive again, rushing away from a crime she'd enjoyed too much. Serving time in all the worst ways.

She doesn't turn around, he doesn't call for her.

So it had happened, what now? Her hotel room, his smile sunk her. Her thoughts keep turning into birds, blinding plumage, flying away. Caroline rises (the cacophony around her head, the thunderous beat of wings, a bird cage with a tiger in it) and she finds a corner, the neck of a bottle in her hand, gathering her evening dress's trail with the other.

She feels like a spoiled princess, and leaves deep red gloss on the rim, watching the sulk of the rest of the room. Suite, Asian-minimalist, the dark bed. If he'd have followed her home, if he'd have _called_ her...there'd have been little doubt where they'd have ended up.

In the morning he'd roll over, sit up, shrug on his Tom Ford jacket, peck her a patronizing peck on the cheek for a fuck well fucked, swipe the liquor from the mini-fridge and leave. _For old time's sake, sweetheart._

She's over-thinking it, her imagination tinted with bitterness. But_ how?_ She'd_ stopped_ being bitter, she'd stopped being hurt. It could have been a pleasant evening. They could have caught up. But anger comes up full force, like steam cracking through the earth's crust, in showers of rock, in white hot falls of sulfur and brine -

_He didn't call her name._

That's what makes her angry.

He'd _love_ for her to think it chivalry, wouldn't he? A way of keeping a promise. But he'd still left the room when she had, he'd followed her down the corridor, and then he'd let her leave. He's a coward. _A coward._

He should have let her go, he shouldn't have left the room, he shouldn't have followed her. At least, not halfway. He should have followed her all the way or _not at all._ He shouldn't have looked at her. He should have stopped her, or let her at least leave without _engaging_ her.

But he followed her, _and he let her leave_.

She's been doing so well, so _well_. It's only that she should have _expected_ that her calm, controlled existence, sustained in careful calculation of the timing, the _geography, _that everything she could possible do to _avoid_ meeting him would also somehow manage to be the choreographing of her own miserable pitfall, because it _happened_. She'd been foolish in thinking she could hold it off.

_That's_ not what's upsetting. It's that it was a chance meeting, as surprising as a high-roller deck in a fixed game. She hadn't known what to do with her hand, but he'd very well known what _not_ to do with his; which was not _play._

Caroline had held her breath her whole life. Held her breath until she'd deluded herself into thinking that she didn't _need_ to anymore. She'd transferred to Albany in her last year of college, scouted out a nice estate for her mother as a retirement home. She'd enjoyed the fresh air, the sweet nectar of dew in the_ one_ place in all of Europe she was _sure_ had never been nest to that thousand year old family of _vipers._

Klaus didn't come hunting for her, fine. Fine. _Good_, Caroline took on philanthropic courses at the next university, meandered, trickling knowledge into her palm like the water at the Trevi fountain. She picked up French like she'd always dreamed of, delighted herself studying the idiosyncrasies of others, the accents, mimicking the native's tongue so she could pretend she was one of their own.

She was happy.

Hell brewed in New Orleans, she started businesses. Excelled at entrepreneurship. Bought into failing industry and raised them up.

Caroline had never particularly enjoyed accounts, but she knew enough about diplomacy, events management and power plays to thrive. She could roam the world and build something of her very own. It was a little niche she was making for herself, something to constructively occupy the time, for she had no delusions about carving out a kingdom for herself - such aspirations always seemed rather arcane and old fashioned to her. Yes, she was a vampire and had all the benefits related to being one, but she wanted to _build_ something using her own efforts, her own smarts. She _had_ smarts, _screw_ Damon, she hoped he was lying in a ditch somewhere, reeling from the latest time Elena decided to remember he was a _dick._

Caroline managed PR companies and she never thought she'd be working the Honduran Cigar business, but that was the market for you.

Climbing the vampire ranks as a character of her own came only recently, _naturally_.

She would never be old enough, or worldly enough to roll with the high-flyers, but she was smart enough and influential enough to be worthy of _note_. She wasn't out to make a name for herself (notoriety often came with strings attached, obviously) but she was always very careful not to be _too_ successful. She enjoyed doing what she was good at. She wouldn't apologize for it. The money didn't matter, the empire didn't matter, her work was her _baby_.

She could still maintain her integrity and still _earn_ things. A life of never having anything handed out to her had given Caroline an appreciation for effort. If she didn't have effort, who _was_ she?

Hell brewed in New Orleans. Caroline flew to Barbados, pal'd it up with Stefan.

Hell brewed in New Orleans, and Stefan was a terrible drunk because he was drunk _roulette_. He could be the life of the party with a brandy in hand, everything tinted in the tones of golden champagne, bubbly, ecstatic, so expensive, so _optimistic_ he'd be tipping the bartender more than the bartender deserved. One too many bourbons though, and he'd be drifting beneath the table, hard jawed, tears pooling in the tight clench of his eyes and muttering about Rebekah's thighs.

New Orleans settled, a brief lull in the storm, and he didn't come to find her.

She - She wasn't waiting around for him alright? She _just_ - when she expected the other shoe to drop…she expected a lot more _noise. _Something of a revelation, something that would either explode into action, or swiftly expire, _dammit_. That was how Klaus _was. _When she was being particularly demanding back in the day...He'd look desperately like he wanted her to _do_ something, and when she didn't _he'd_ react. She'd wanted a reaction, god dammit, she'd wanted him to tell her he loved her, or tell her that he'd stopped. She'd wanted a clean, break. Kill it, abandon it, but not this…this _silence_.

Silence didn't leave her anything at all.

* * *

"It's simple," Stefan says. "You either love him, or you don't."

Stefan kicks back his heels on the table, a fork jangles off the edge. White breasted ravens swim across the lens of his shades, flinging themselves up, flying off the blue picket fence around the cafe.

Prague's launching itself into the lull of the night, darkness rippling slowly like an oil spill down the side of a barrel, like a deep black sea. Its face prickling in city lights pretending to be stars and Caroline still has to catch her breath every time she sees the skyline.

"I don't like you like this." Drunk. _Blaze_, she means, almost like he couldn't give a shit. Except that she sees him better than that. Somehow with Stefan loosening up over the past few years, taking pleasure in the little things, in pricey hotels, cheap beer, sweet giggling girls who don't speak English, and slow tour buses through Europe...He's become..._happier_ than he was before. Sloshed most of the time, and strangely sober for it. Stefan sees things clearly and sometimes it comes off as brutal. "You over-simplify the complicated."

They haven't talked about him in years, in what feels like millenniums. Stefan had only waited a beat before talking about him. Like he'd only been tasting the air before commenting on the weather. It's only a _conversation,_ like no time's passed at all. Like they haven't been walking on eggshells about the past for years. Like it won't undo an age of enforced indifference.

"Isn't that what you want me to do? You want me to make it simple for you, so you can make sense of it."

"You know very well that the way you feel now, and the way you felt _then_…" Her mouth halts over the name, over Elena. It's always roulette with Elena, she pitches the conversation headlong into the gravel, or into the air. "Stefan, it's not static. It's _always_ changing."

"There's you answer."

"It isn't helping me."

"That's love for you."

"It isn't love." She says, she should kill the conversation, it's very much in danger of making some things make sense. "_It isn't love_. It's not eternal, it's not a contract, it's not a yes, or a no."

"I think you know that." Stefan pronounces in a hard drawl that makes her feel like an _idiot_. "So - you either love him, or you don't. I think you know whether you love him or you don't. That's not what's getting you back."

Caroline bangs the table with the heel of her palm. "I'm not talking about - "

Stefan knows _exactly_ what she's talking about, he knows exactly what she's _thinking_ about. Perfume, lipstick on the rim of a glass. Her name in a soldier's mouth.

Night begins to chant its tongue of metal, the swerve of wheels beneath a traffic light. Caroline filters off into silence, hears crickets rasping in her ears, the teeth of an autumn chill, and her face heats up in a red, shameful bloom. Stefan _knows._

"What do you want, Caroline?"

"Why didn't he _speak_ to me?"

And then - and then Stefan asks her the things she's too _stupid_ to ask herself, "Why didn't _you_ say anything?"

Caroline, Caroline - it takes her aback. Her brow knits together, and it's dreadfully apparent how she's missed a whole new angle of this. Why didn't she say anything? What was it, though? Pride? Anger? Was she angry?

A typewriter bangs away in her head, she can't catch her breath until the pin jams - it _jams_.

_Was she angry?_

It's not that simple. It's a cacophony of personal woes, of private concerns. She doesn't want to go over them again and again, it does _nothing_ for her self-esteem. Is she angry?

Yes. _Maybe_. She doesn't know if she is anymore though. Is she _sad?_ Yeah, maybe she fucking _deserves_ to be? Does she owe him anything? She doesn't - she _doesn't!_ Was it just a fuck in the dirt? Just an ill-thought out fling?

Is she angry? Cogs and gears clang, loud enough to rupture ear drums. There's the noise of the truth in all this muddle, shrieking clear like the cry of a hawk come to tear her guts out. Caroline's not angry, she's fucking _pissed._

She's _angry_ so she _doesn't have to be scared._

This is what it is; She's _betrayed_. She's sad. Stefan (with his million dollar fucking _face_ and the shampoo commercial wet dream called his hair, and his ability to conjure up the love of every being within _sight_ of him) has never had the problem of dealing with being nothing but a filthy fuck. Even Rebekah who claimed their time together was nothing more than a wild time hadn't been able to help haunting him across the earth, following him, some atom of her drawn inexplicably to him. Like a magnet to the constant, immovable north.

Klaus…_Klaus_ made her feel like a filthy fuck for thinking there was anything more between them. Damn the promises they might have made about staying away from each other. He didn't say anything, he didn't _say_ anything -

_How._ Frustration, immense frustration builds in her. He'd told her in no uncertain terms that he loved her, well - he never _said_ the words, but she _knew_. She'd expected him to remain that way. She was angry at herself for it, but she'd also felt in the grips of some lucid, formless caution when it came to what she believed, and what she _thought_ she should believe when it came to Klaus. She kissed him, she _liked_ it. She had let him roll down her panties while a hundred miles away, some _girl_ was carrying his child, something he never thought to _mention_. And she's not angry with her, with the girl, with _Hayley_ - oh, not for _that._ It's not even _about_ the girl.

This was about this...this _future_ he'd suddenly determined closed to her because he didn't have the damn _decency_ to tell her anything to her face, because he had the unmitigated, inexcusable arrogance to think he could invite her to enjoy the world (like it was his to even fucking _offer_), enjoy _her_, and think she'd just…she'd _just_ _never give a fuck anymore?_ Like he'd set her _free?_

He'd done it because he was a _coward_. He didn't want to tell her to her face that he'd done the _one_ thing that would censor him to her forever. Proved the universe right, story of her life. _Of course_ the laws of nature would bend themselves out of shape to tell Caroline that no matter who told her they loved her, no matter who pretended to do it, there would _always_ be some other bitch, some _other_ cause, some other mission to shunt her aside.

She thought about him. In her lousiest hours she'd furrowed into a corner of her apartment, grip choking around a bottle, wondered _was that it?_ Boom and bust? _She thought about him. _She thought he was a filthy liar, and then she remembered that half of the blame _could_ be said to be hers.

And _this_, this is _exactly_ what pisses her off, what sets her _back_ - she's earned her stripes, okay? She's learnt, she's older, she's _wiser - _and _still_ the thought of Klaus, the _mention_, the _hint_ of him, drives her up the wall in such a delirious flood of longing, of grief, of anger, of self-doubt and righteous_ fury_, and guilt too. Because in some small way she feels _guilty_. She wouldn't go back to change anything, she knows. She has the sense enough to know that if she had a chance she wouldn't have changed a thing, not about how she treated him. She didn't _do_ anything wrong.

_But be honest, love_ - Caroline digs into the inside of her cheek, clenching her fists. _Are you really certain?_ If she'd known this would be where they'd have been in fifty years…would she still have fucked him? Would she still have…would she have let it go on?

Was the taste of her so brief, so _underwhelming,_ that there was really no reason to chase anymore? He'd had her, she'd been _had_, another notch in his bed post, a stepping stone in his endless journey for self-discovery the way he was supposed to be in _hers._

_Came back to Mystic Falls for one last fuck, and left it. One pony town, nothing that he needed once he'd had her._

Klaus thought he was opening doors for her, which was in some ways true, but she'd shut more doors because of him. She'd decided never to set a foot in New Orleans, even if it was torched up in sulfurous flames, even if the earth decided to crack beneath it and swallow it up. She'd never want to step onto his territory, pick him up on that offer just so she could put her life in danger or be utterly _rejected_. She has _some_ self-respect.

She doesn't _need_ him, it's not denial speaking. She doesn't need him to survive, to be happy, but she can't rest without a clean break. She can't rest without knowing why he didn't speak to her.

She _deserves_ more than that.

Stefan thumbs back his glasses with the ditzy pink frames, snatched from the tangle of one of the girl's hair that morning. He thumbs back his glasses and fixes her with eyes that are more red than white, bloodshot.

Stefan's one of those people who sees someone pandering about a problem, who will know the heart of it, quietly tolerating Caroline's denial until he can't bear it any longer. Waiting until both parties had had enough before very bluntly forcing her to confront it.

This is what is is. She was _afraid_. She didn't speak because she was afraid, and she was proud, but pride didn't stop her turning around, it was _fear_.

She was afraid he didn't _want_ her anymore, that she was right about the world again, that the _universe_ was right.

She was afraid that needing him to love her didn't have anything to do with vanity anymore - she was afraid that maybe, _maybe_ she loved him, and that maybe she'd loved him for a very long _time_, and that _if_ she loved him she was afraid that he'd already known she was unwilling to sacrifice anything for it. Not her independence, not her freedom, and worse yet, that she wouldn't _have_ to sacrifice anything anymore - because maybe he didn't _want_ her anymore.

Maybe she wasn't that figure of gold and light he'd been delusional enough to tell her she was, and she'd been delusional to maybe - for a breath, for a fractured second, caught in her like a splinter - _believe._

She'd had nineteen birthdays without a phone call, without a murmur, without _anything_ -

She was_ afraid_, and she was afraid of knowing, and Caroline - Caroline could never allow anyone to call her a coward. She _wasn't_ - she wasn't a coward.

Was it love? Truly? Love? Caroline didn't think she quite knew exactly. She only knew that love should either live or die, not _poison_ everything.

"I need an answer, I need to know if any of it…" Caroline swallows, "If any of it was _real_."

"For him, or for you?"

"I was afraid."

"You're allowed to be, Caroline."

"No," she snaps, "No, I'm not."

And he doesn't deserve the excuse.

* * *

She forgoes her sleek red suitcase for a black duffle bag. Stefan rubs his eyes, shoulder against the door frame, yawn sticky with sleep, watching her finish packing. She's not hasty. She's brusque, rather. She packs vital toiletries, a small make-up bag, one set of clothes, her wallet, her phone - her _phone?_

Stefan's sweeping a finger over the screen, brow in a wrinkle. "Tight flight plan."

She whips her curls back from her shoulder before extending her hand, impatiently motioning for him to return it. "In and out."

"It's not a robbery," Her phone flips through the air, she barely catches it. Stefan's mouth pinches. "Is it?"

Caroline closes her booking app, tersely slipping it into her jeans pocket before she faces him again. She'll be arriving in the afternoon, book a room to freshen up, and she'll be leaving immediately midnight of the same day. She gives him a leaden grin, won't be a spoil sport. "Maybe a murder."

It is a murder though, isn't it? Whatever he says, it'll either swiftly end this dumb thing of theirs, or...or? She doesn't know. Either way, it's time to close the chapter.

* * *

She's tired of existential melancholy.

Do you still love me?

No? If you don't why did you stop?

Did you ever really love me then?

If you do love me, _why does it feel like you stopped?_

* * *

This is the truth. He hurt her.

Or rather, she _let_ him hurt her.

She thought about New Orleans, about plane tickets, about reunions - She thought about a man with lips held in a strange curve, torn between selfish pride, and the distraction of a predator with a fondness of the prey. And what a mistake he'd made, thinking she was that. That she was _prey._

And how his mistake was a wonder to him, a startling, stunning revelation. How he'd look at her sometimes like the sight of her walking into a room was a knife to the gut.

There at the bar with a smile, amused at their distractions, at their feints, their antics. Allowing her to draw his eye away while Pinky and the Brain scurried into his house to raise all sorts of ruckus. Pleasantly, patiently, he drinks the sight of her up through his eyes, knowing exactly that it's a game. It's _alright_ if it's a game, it's alright if she doesn't mean it. Her skirt floats a delicate, scandalous inch above the middle of her thighs, her shirts cut to invite his stare - but he looks her in the eye the whole time. The whole _time_.

He's looking at her, at _Caroline_. He's _listening_ to her.

_Yeah, I know,_ she'd told Stefan the same night. After she'd shrugged a jacket over her scandalously revealing shirt, knocking her heels against the gutter around the rooftop of her house. Stefan had had his knees drawn to his chest, mouth twisting at the corner because his personal anguish had been warring with a sardonic amusement at her recent escapades as romantic distraction. Hero hair rattled by the gnawing cold. _A real listener, every girl's dream._

She opened a bank account, contacted a stock broker. She goes to Malaysia, dabbles with some architectural firms, and in her ear, she can hear him whispering about _music._

Those days she plugs in Dashboard Confessional or Wheezer and mentally flips him off.

It's all a show, though. _This_ is the truth; She changed direction but the thought of him still plagued her. She kept herself busy, and her thoughts would still readjust themselves, reform, realign so that the thought of him again would slide into her life, like a book into a nook, like bone to joint. Why? Because he isn't gone really, is he? Not for her.

She let him in, and when he left she didn't shut the door properly behind him. He didn't really leave, did he? He's her, he's _inside_ her. He's the mirror, the window in a windowless room, the crack in the roof to let the rain in. The crackling draft. He's not the inanimate fixture she wishes he was, collecting dust in the corner – he's the elephant in the room, making a mess, making silence the bloodiest racket, making it the fire blazing in the roof.

He's the pestilence beneath the boards, the tunnel beneath the earth, the wardrobe in the wall taking her to kingdoms she couldn't have possibly hoped to have realized herself _before_ him. It's true, it's _true_. She didn't dream before, only want, empty want sliding through her like knives. She doesn't owe _anything_ to him, nothing but the slow realization that she could allow herself to dream. The realization that she could allow herself to _want_ things and he's -

He's the storm blaring against the trellis, shaking the walls, demanding unbarred entrance. Thoughts of him come along whenever they please, like he's got a standing invitation she couldn't remember ever giving him.

And it hurts not to know _anything_. It hurts that they didn't face each other that night, that he didn't speak to her. It hurts too, all those years ago, in the woods, that he didn't speak to her then either. It hurts that he didn't tell her _anything_.

It hurts that she's got an outdated smart phone in her mom's attic with nothing on it but the rumble of an old voice message, silted in static and traffic on heat cracked roads, seething in the humidity of a city she'd sworn never to visit.

"It's like Ovid said," Stefan murmurs into her ear at the airport, the aftershave molding over the booze in his blood stream. Burgundy lipstick on the collar of his shirt, a feckless souvenir. His fingers card into the hairs at her nape and his jacket presses her lips so hard to her teeth that it's a wonder her mouth doesn't fill with blood. "Nothing retains its form. New is shaped from old."

When he pulls away she looks into his green eyes, hot and gloomy like monsoons. like the humid canopies of jungles. What does he _mean?_ He looks grave enough, his eyes loud like someone trying to talk to her from beneath the ice. So at least she knows he's not trying to deliberately confuse her; he's trying to make her think. _Think,_ Caroline.

Stefan runs his thumbs over her jaw bone, intently warning her with his strangeness. "Be careful," Laconic, low and urgent. "Don't lose."

His sudden quiet severity clings to every line of him, it scares her. She suddenly feels like she's going to war, _really_ going to war.

Her hair jangles around her shoulders as she nods, her brows pull. "Don't lose." She repeats, and he purses his lips, hovers a thoughtful moment before he slides away.

Her skin stings. Stefan brushes off her shoulders, Stefan adjusts the collar of her coat maddeningly paternal, Stefan touches her temples before he pats her back. Stefan takes her in, and Stefan turns away into a crowd that readily swallows him up.

Stefan lets her go.

* * *

In her dreams he has the same way of moving.

Klaus's presence could be so subtle, sat so comfortably self-aware of his dangerousness that it almost succeeded in hiding utterly how he has always been self-destructively torn between malevolence and affection - that he has been divided like bloody war ground between man and wolf for years trying to break a curse meant to steal from him, deny him what he _is_, and in denying; deprive, _twist_.

A lit candle wick spluttering and flaring bright and low and bright again, shifting faster than a pendulum, with his mouth lifting, the glint of a canine, that at the sight of her takes a warmer, golden tone. Here is the silk slipping away from steel, here is the hand bared away by the slip of a glove. Gentleman, scoundrel, and courting her wrath as many times as it will take to find even the barest glimpse of her favor.

And so he moves. He moves the way a blade cuts. The floor becomes sticky beneath her feet, sucking around her ankles, hungry for her stillness. His eyes land on her and he _transforms. _The very nature of him untwists, smooths, like a carpet rolling out for her sharp stilettos, and she too - _she_ transforms too, doesn't she? Body suffusing warmth like a blush in a rosy cheek, she in kind, doesn't she? _Caroline_ transforms.

In the dream she joins him at the bar and he talks to her with his strange northern burr, a soft intimacy to his voice when he says her name. His mouth lovely and breaking around the words in a nervous, deeply fond quiver. His lovely mouth that says, _I've missed you_, so she doesn't have to admit anything herself.

Klaus's lovely mouth and his murdering hands.

In the dream he doesn't touch her except to pour her a drink.

In the dream she wants to throw out a hand, tell him stop. No further. Don't come any closer.

And here the sounds feel like watercolor, blurry and warm, and everything else is so _bright, _like a city sunk beneath the water. Klaus stops midway, black sole print on burgundy floorboards, mid-breath, mid-beat. Promptly commanded by her warnings. He cocks his head. Listening for something and not _understanding_ at all.

_I know that you need a place_, Caroline wants to say. In the dream it's screaming in her throat but it won't come up, like the words have little hooks, snagged and painfully caught. _Everyone wants a place, it doesn't always have to be in someone else._

She wants to tell him that she understands loving people who don't love you back, oh god, she _majored_ in that. So don't think that she doesn't know – don't think she doesn't _know_ the cut of rejection, the slash to the soul words like 'No' and 'Never' make. She knew it long before Stefan stood in the licking glow of the bush fire part, the forest dark and dancing, long before he smiles, brutally sincere, _You and me, it's never going to happen_

He'd not been the first boy to crush her heart in the first beat, but she'd been trying to make sure that he'd be one of the last. She _knows_. God, does Caroline know. She doesn't want to be swept away by his misplaced affections. Because she knows what this all means, she knows, she _knows._

Caroline isn't someone he loves, she's a _metaphor._

* * *

And then she thinks she doesn't doubt Klaus would kill for her, but she very much doubts that he would die for her.

* * *

She steps onto the ground, out of the air. Spine stiff, shoulders back, ready to treat with others with dignity, ready to slip into battle stance. Duffle bag in hand, sleek white pumps, glasses flung into the classic blonde hair. New Orleans heat swarms over her skin, sweeping away the air conditioned cool of the plane.

Sunlight blares against her face and Caroline picks up her bags. Taxis scream yellow over the winding roads, all bark and no bite, swarming with traffic, the metal constructs of the buildings expanding - it's the hottest day in summer. Caroline hails a cab and spreads her white skirt over her knees.

After the hotel she picks another taxi, directs him out loud, the location like rote. See, there's an old colonial house, four tiers, like a self-important wedding cake. Regal the way the weight of history curves the spine backwards, lofty roof raised.

Out of the way of the city, far from the noise of bourbon street.

It has a lawn that's a ridiculously fresh green, untouched by drought. Vibrant bursting up from the ground, freshly mowed. There's a long drive-way that the taxi driver hesitates to roll into, he thumbs back his cap before he crawls past the arch without a gate.

Exhaust pours out the back of it, hastening away from Caroline on the creaking porch.

* * *

_I'm not asking you to die for me. Say you will die for me._

* * *

There's a man, a stupid man. The stupidest man. On his knees. _On his knees._

Head bowed, wouldn't care to have it struck off. She'd stopped taking offence to that somewhere along the way.

Who would devils fear to give their backs to? Who is more alive, more stupid, than a man on his knees, spreading white veils over her feet, fingers spread like wings, deliberate, ardent.

Her ankle wobbles in a tall heeled shoe, and his hand goes upward, outward, for hers to slip into. Not a breath wasted in reacting to steady her, not a break in his concentration. And isn't he just utterly reactionary? Moving according to her is as intrinsic to him as breathing, as if his heart can beat only after the jolt of hers?

She's in his white dress. When he looks up at her he has these _eyes_. The chandelier light catches in the painted glass of his eyes, blue and rippling, and green and varied as Northern Lights. His Northern Light eyes, millennium bound, as vital as the hour, as new, as brilliant. On her, they swear all sorts of things. When she was a child she might have looked like that, hands clasped, kneeling next to her bed, knuckles to temples, knees on the scratchy pink carpet she'd only managed to tear off and redo once she was thirteen. She might have had that once in her eyes, the ardent light of the purest prayer. Even when she was wishing for silly things, for dolls, and dresses, and kindness.

Today she makes demands instead.

_Grace of Monaco hot_, she snapped. There was Catherine the Great, there was Elizabeth and Cleopatra, all neatly disorganized in the attic. She doesn't ask who wore this one, she doesn't want to know, it doesn't bother her. It's strange though, the position they're in. So she asks herself so many things, so many typical _Caroline_ things. Will he collect something of her too? Something to put away? Something for the next girl, the next darling to wear?

Very calmly though, like these are thoughts she things about other people. People she's read about it. People she isn't.

It doesn't matter very much, she doesn't mind right _now._ She wouldn't dare utter a single word with his hands floating around her ankles, with the silence fringing the air in delicate cobwebs.

His soul pouring out of his eyes, the air around him sucking and stretching, bending itself out of shape to accommodate him. His static heart, his whirlwind heart, spitting everything out for her. He won't put her away. He's spreading white skirts over her feet, scrubbing his knuckles over his knee to get the ink stains out, he's careful, so very careful not to stain her dress. He couldn't put her away.

Her hand goes clammy in his, she's running out of time. She doesn't rush him.

He's on his knees. She should savor it but her pulse pumps, oxygen and blood production. The air around her throat baked by the fire place and it is _everything_ - It is everything that no one else ever gave her.

And she has seen his store. There are tiger lillies in the attic, torn from a warlord's daughter, pressed in a book filched off a scribe. Niklaus the collector, swallower of art, meddling in history, skulking in the background, taking everything that was never going to be freely given.

Except for her, for Caroline Forbes.

There's a man, a stupid man. The stupidest man. On his knees. _On his knees._

* * *

A maid leads her in, black uniform, white apron, the whole nine yards. It's a beautiful house, grander than any property she owns - the foyer is large, it opens up wide to accommodate a graceful curving staircase, deep colonial woodwork, the set-back mullioned windows...they let in light on a floor that's warmer than brandy.

They go into a walnut paneled sitting room, it's wide and white and smells faintly of lemon. Like a Southern afternoon. A wide porch rises beyond the French doors, letting in light, breezy, bright and clear. It's the hour before afternoon grasps the hand of the evening, and Caroline seats herself at an elegant couch before an empty, clean fireplace.

The maid has disappeared, Caroline waits. She keeps her heart steady, so she recites the names she knows, the architectural features - she counts one, _bousillage_. Two, _galleries._ Three, _arbitoire_. Four, Stefan.

Stefan -

* * *

Stefan, she thinks of _Stefan_ - Stefan and his beautiful girls, and his stupid dopey, drunk smile - Stefan and his nasty way of grinning at people who comment about his pick of women.

_One day, whether you are fourteen, twenty-eight or sixty-five_… Stefan saying all the right things, things he's experienced, thing he shamelessly airlifts out of the stupid literature he keeps beneath the chaise lounge.

Stefan, miles away, calling her back - saying, _love isn't brains, Caroline._

* * *

The lace fringe of her white dress scarce over her knees, Caroline is more or less composed. She's not seventeen anymore. It's meant to flirt with him and forbid him too, tastefully cut, the saint's white clinging to her hips and snug on her thighs. She's got legs that go for miles and sleek white pumps.

In the hotel she'd taken stock of herself in the mirror with fastidious care. _To be is to be perceived_, Graham Greene wrote. Though she does not think herself as bitter and disillusioned as Maurice, or as holy-in-her-suffering-Mary, Caroline understands costume, understands stage presence.

Her life has always been about forcing herself to delicate balances; _don't smile too much or they'll think you're desperate, but if you don't smile at all everyone's going to think you're a prude_. But she's going for a very distinct impression, lovely but forbidding. It's been twenty years and she is afraid of no one.

The sleeves end above her wrist, the collar a high pretty line just beneath her collarbones, cutting off to give the gleam of her shoulders, the dips of her collar bones. Without ornament, she is dressed like a crystal clear flute of water. Her throat bare, her hair pinned up with the sun setting off molten white in the yellow notes. She doesn't look seventeen; she doesn't _feel _seventeen until he walks into the room.

A shadow splashed in her peripheral, a splatter of paint of canvas. Noon slanting through the panels, that Southern afternoon humming sweetly sweet, tart with lemon, and his sudden still – to see the windows and their shower of light, and to see _her_ there. Caroline feels him in the room long before he does her and she realizes that he hadn't been expecting her.

Why does that feel funny?

She turns her head to look at him, it's just a look, _Caroline_. It's just a meeting, a business meeting – you're an adult, you're grown _up_. You're not scared, and you can't be awed. You've seen enough of the world to realize it was never his to promise. Belonging is _such_ a crude concept but…she turns and can't look at him right away, words like swallowed knives – Her hands folded in her lap, a finger on the skim of one knee, like she can pretend that she's in a board room and not in his house – she'd had no problem believing in belonging before, had she?

Klaus stands in the doorway, beneath the cursed _bousillage_, and somehow manages to fill the whole room.

She has a split second where she regrets _everything_, where her nails burrow into her sleeve, and her heart bangs hard against her ribs, and her palms go clammy. Like she's that stupid girl letting him spread her white skirts over her feet on prom night, whole body thrumming for him to get it _over_ with.

She's grown up, she's Caroline, she's _learnt_ - but Klaus fills up the whole room, and she remembers all over, _everything_. How her name could sound from him, soft in his mouth, and like a gunshot, all at once.

He looks the same, he _moves_ the same. And my, does he _move_, cautious at first, testing almost, like he's trying an old fit of an old pair of gloves, _oh he looks the same_ – he looks the same, same red mouth, even the same. He even _almost_ looks at her the same way he looked at her all those years ago. From under his lashes, gauging how far she'll let him go.

The air in front of him seems to spark, like someone's flung up a handful of gunpowder, and it's like the dream again, the air diving out of her - and Caroline acts immediately, indicates the seat opposite her and speaks before he can set the tone, "Hello."

The maid's set out tea and scones, of all things. So very civilized. Caroline's voice comes out cool somehow, the tremble smoothed out of it. It's a business meeting, they're acquaintances. Even if she can't yet look at him she wins her control in this room in other ways. Caroline had asked for two cups, calmly commandeering his novel little maid like she was her own office staff.

Caroline can't look at him. Lightly she lifts the teapot, eye on the task at hand, she pours out the tea, as civil and elegant as she'd learnt in Paris. He might have all the old graces, but she can learn them too, weaned on years of aching for that Mystic Falls crown. She knows the old graces, can execute them better because she lives and breathes them and Klaus's charm is all about being brutal. She doesn't look at him, her heart sits steady behind her ribs, balanced still on a precispse, ready to rush headlong out of grace. If she looks at him she's lost.

"One or two?"

Klaus isn't as mannered as his brother but he's too startled to be rude. Courtesies are always wonderful to fall back on, the instinctive crutch when met with a surprise. She feels the floorboards creak and his answer has a levelness, tempered by caution and maybe reproach she isn't supposed to hear. "None."

Reproach, for surprising him. Another time she might have expected some delight, but Klaus has read the board she perches on. She is not dressed in flirty ruffles, or smiling at him, she is not here to delight him or distract him, and he senses that. He has the good sense not to gloat the way he did in Vienna, over the crash of glass and the flatterers, over a game.

She can feel him in her peripheral, moving dumbly, taking a seat. Opposite her. They're indulging one another in their own ways. Caroline obeys his request. Ten years ago she might have been determined to overrule him, to show him who wore the pants. Hilarious really, those little spats. She hasn't outgrown herself yet, she doesn't ever want to, but she has learnt well enough to pick her battles. This is her battle.

All this opens over a spoonful of sugar. She lifts the saucer and cup and places it gently across from her, closer to him. Dark cotton drawn over his knees, his right hand curled on his lap, chill silver behind the ridge of one knuckle... She only takes a glimpse of him, a passing flicker between her efficient movements. Like he's beneath her notice, like it's really nothing. Oh, twenty years, huh?

Truth is, if she takes in much more of the sight of him too soon she might do something drastic. He, on the other hand…he watches her steadily, attention resolutely observant rather than affectionate. It's got the same heat crawling around her throat anyway.

He's got his eyes on her all the while, hunched forward. He always knew how to ruffle her best. Just to _look_ at her, weighty and immovable in intent. Now she thinks he's looking at her like she's got a white oak stake strapped to her thigh. Twenty years is a long time to hold a torch for someone.

When she is sure she isn't going to make a fool of herself Caroline draws back slowly, spine against the back of the chair. Idly stirring. "How have you been?"

She wants nothing more than to be drastic, spit back words. Champagne and banter, right? But she knows her coolness will startle him more, knows it unnerves him more, because civility is not what he expects. Not from Caroline Forbes. Not to him.

It's ridiculous to not look at him though, if she keeps it up any longer it will obvious she doesn't want to make eye contact. She flicks her eyes up, meets his. Is not weak.

He's not the same.

Light cuts white and blind, flooding over her ankles, her lap, drawn over her shoulder, catching in her hair. If she turns her head the glare of it will be strike her blind. She knows it flatters her though. Unbearably the afternoon's falling, his side of the room dredged in cool darkness, typical. This is how they're rendered, the sunlight warms her from shin to thigh, hot and uncomfortable, and him in the soft fall of shadow, cool as a cave.

It's too hot. She calculates how many hours she's got before her flight, crunching the numbers behind her eyes. Being half blind makes it easier to look at him, not much easier to breathe though. There isn't enough air in the room, but Caroline - if she moves away from the stifling heat, he'll counter, match her step for step.

She's distracted him with the question and he's still for now, but…but if she moves, _he'll move too_. It's how everything has always been between them, with everything she says and does acting as the first, strange catalyst.

And she _remembers_ this, she's _missed_ this turning and twisting. She's waiting to see if it's still the same. Klaus waiting for her to move, to fight, so he can show her how silly she is. Klaus standing breathlessly still so she can kiss him, his heart bursting beneath her palm, hanging still in disbelief for so long, so _long_. Breathlessly still, so still for such throttling seconds. Then he was anything but stillness, lunging right back at her with all that infamous ferocity spiking through her lungs, that whispered-of violence, driving his knuckles into her hair. Klaus gauging everything by what she does. They're circling cats, aren't they?

Klaus manages to seem lethargic and razor sharp all at once, sitting still in his own house, pointed to a seat in his own drawing room. The heat against her legs is nothing compared to the confused, heady heat of having his eyes on her again. To know that he was somehow made to mirror her, that theirs is a relentless, rather selfish sort of courtship. If she moves, he'll _counter_.

And she knows the ferocity of his body now, the fit of her thighs around his hips, his fingers bent hard into the underside of her calves. She's gathered enough of him to know how he felt like, to know him more intimately than she should, gathered in her like caviar on the tongue, waiting for the swallow of vodka. All the edges of him stuck in her, like he was still there, some misshapen embryo pressing out its talons beneath her paper skin, tongue humming around her marrow.

Does he know that she's here to purge him from her body? She hadn't thought about it before Vienna, Vienna reminded her it was necessary. It's unhealthy. It's a battle. There's something very savage in the shifting balance, something that can never be settled – like oceans, or rivers, or seas. Like hurricanes that start and don't know how to end. This is the war that nobody wins.

But it _is_ a war that she needs to end.

Klaus holds her gaze, and his eyes have none of that familiarity, that gentleness. He only regards her patiently, hiding everything. "Well. And how are you keeping?"

He should have said that warmly, as warm as the way he used to say things to her before. All honey and awe, laid low by holy light. He doesn't speak the way he did before.

She hasn't really heard him speak directly to her in twenty years, it ends the crucial spell. Tone level, hard r's and crisp animosity, forbidding.

"I'm doing alright," Her spoon tinkles against the porcelain saucer, "What were you doing in Vienna?"

He lifts a shoulder, his hands loose between the chair and the coffee table. "Same thing you were."

Bullshit. He's lying, he's a filthy _liar_ - his expression smooth, studied nonchalance. His heart doesn't skip a single beat. Caroline thinks she knows him enough to spot his tells, but Klaus doesn't _have_ any. His hands hanging between his knees, his posture liquid enough to maneuver away from any attack. None of that rapt attention he afforded her all those years ago. Just a patient waiting, like a steel trap that'll snap efficiently, finally, no matter how pretty she dances.

He's not the _same_. His tie in a neat, immaculate knot, no Henley in sight – he's looking at her, thoughtful. Not the kind of thoughtful he usually reserves for her. Not the kind of thoughtful the cut of her dress knows. He's not the same. He's more serious. She doesn't know him at all.

But it's her move now and Caroline bites the inside of her mouth, archly. "I wasn't told you were going to be there."

"Neither was the host," He replies easily, "I dropped in."

"Naturally, you weren't refused." Caroline skims a fingertip off the tea cup and sets it down, casually catty. Klaus purses his lips, whether to squash a smile or a scowl, she can't tell. "Why did you come? Oh, excuse me, it's just," she waves her fingers through the air, politely apologetic, "_I_ was there to network, and networking doesn't really seem to be your thing."

"You pick up a few _things_ here and there, over time," He's cautious, careful with how he pronounces things. Caroline has no apologies to make, not to him, "I did the priest a favor a few centuries ago," He tilts his head, dangerously close to one of his churlish smiles, but he won't give her even the charity of that nostalgia now. He's very deliberate not to. "Sometimes a little reminding is beneficial. As for the rest, I am still their sovereign."

Caroline's mouth thins, her eyes bright, vindictive, her words as airy as fluff. "Oh, how nice. Will you collect on this favor?"

"Not necessarily." It's bizarrely conversational, these throws and catches. With her level tone lobbying sparkling bon-mots masquerading as small talk, a thin veil of politeness over her hostility. And him answering her easy and calm, none of that old wonder. "I've lived for a long time, important to reach out to acquaintances and refresh old partnerships."

Now that's just childish, Klaus is losing his touch. That barb is as precise as it is inelegant but it does the job because behind her ribs a fire growls. Lunging beneath her mask of polite indifference, hissing, is she that? An acquaintance? Is Caroline an _acquaintance?_

Klaus says these words with no particular stress on any, very level, very effortless. Stefan and him must have been desk buddies in Bull Shit 101; _How To Be An Asshole and Sound Like You're Talking About The Weather._

And that's it. That's the last straw, does he think she's a child? She knows these things, she knows that the world keeps turning, the moon comes up in the night, and that these are the only things that will never change. He's changed has he? Smart enough to refresh old partnerships? The way he moved like he didn't need anyone to help him rule, didn't need the simpering diplomacy, the alliances, only himself. And now he was out cavorting with old acquaintances, calling himself sovereign?

_Sovereign?_

Caroline's happy for him, she _really_ is. Oh, she _hopes_ he's happy. She hopes he's so happy it claws up his throat and strangles him dead, throttles him so he can't sleep. He has his kingdom, she doesn't doubt before eternity's up he could encompass the whole earth, but not at this pace. He's King of New Orleans, some swampy thumbprint on a great map. A steaming Southern novelty city in a rusty patch of America, minuscule enough to be _nothing_. He spoke the word 'world' like it was an Empire, and here he stood – playing Mayor in the bayou.

And is that it? Is he stupid enough to want more? Does he seriously think that he can _keep_ anything? So his vision mightn't be the same, she hasn't been here for that. But nothings changed, not the world that keeps turning, and the moon that still rises up with the night. She's a monster. He's a monster, she knows, they all are, but he's a single man. If he can't buy love, he must command fear.

She knows that it's important to keep yourself busy when you have forever. She doesn't appreciate him patronizing her, taking the tone of someone older than her, talking about the _value_ of partnerships.

"I hadn't realized that you placed such importance in networking, great, invincible immortal that you are."

It's coquettish, pitilessly saucy. It has only a fraction of the venom she _really_ feels, it surges - this fresh wave of hatred at how the vampires around the table had crooned around him, kissing his ass, fearing him, and great, fantastic, fucking _Klaus_ soaking it all up. Klaus following her out of the room and not saying _anything_. Klaus who says nothing now, nothing of substance really. Klaus who looks at her utterly unreadable, utterly without guilt, it is bewildering - utterly bewildering to have him listen to her and not see him hang on her every word.

Once upon a time her scorn wilted him away, could render him in a moment toothless, surprised at his own weakness, and even then allowing her to drag it out anyway.

She wants to _punch_ him, but first, the heart of the matter. Because she doesn't want to dance around Klaus all night, the longer she draws it out, the lower her chances of victory. Klaus is a fucking plague, long term exposure guarantees permanent brainlessness, and Stefan said _don't lose_.

It means stripping her skin off, it means tearing apart the mask of hostile indifference; it's a punch to her pride, but… necessary casualties. Collateral damage, he'd told her once, and the urge to kick him is as overwhelming as the urge to flee. If she fled maybe he'd catch her, maybe he'd say the words so she didn't have to. But that's cowardice and fear, and she allows herself none of these things, she needs to say the words. She needs to know the truth.

Caroline asks the questions that hurt her, staring him straight in the eye, cool as steel. "Did you know I was going to be there?"

"Why?" He asks not a beat after, like he'd expected it, and _there_ it is - words coming out of him with a little edge, reproach like the muffled whiff of another woman's perfume. Hard to hear. Hard to taste. But _so_ there - so there she wants to be _sick_. "Does it matter?"

"Yes," Caroline says, she's old enough to know what she wants now. She's old enough to admit it without feeling like she's lost something. "It matters very much."

Klaus blinks, the half lidded slow blink of a feline. She's surprised him. She wonders if he wanted something louder from her, something less brusque - she wonders if her cold wrath disappoints him. Maybe if she was spitting fire and calling down brimstone, he'd have known her, smiled and called her sweetheart. He's not worth the effort, she tells herself, even as her blood _boils_.

However, there is a peculiar light headed feeling about spitting the things he doesn't expect. He expects an accusation, defensiveness maybe, not admittance, not a confession that _yes, it matters_. There's bravery there, expanding in her atrium like a goddamn blockage, waiting to stuff her dead, she wants to get it out though. Get it out in the open.

She's not girly little Caroline anymore, she told Stefan that. Stefan who says_ love isn't brains_, sobering as a bullet wound.

Caroline can surrender ground by admitting the things she wants and asking the questions that hurt her - if the truth will come out of it, if she'll get the answers that will help her out of the war. She uses this little space she's secured, this small breath of surprise. "Why did you follow me?"

He can't look her in the eye cool and furious. He gives that to the floor. His knuckles crack, and his mouth cuts, "_Why are you here?_"

A rattling, defensive rage pushes up in her chest, swarming right against her ribs. Klaus has a lot of nerve, being short with her. A lot of fucking _nerve._

She doesn't like his begrudging tone, the caginess of his posture. He's a coward, diverting her questions, avoiding her. He's a coward, and he thinks she's _stupid._

She smiles at him then, crossing her legs daintily, leaning forward with the prettiest mouth, sweet and tart as Mystic Falls prized lemonade. Miss Mystic Falls and her endless legs, her hostess smile, honeyed brainlessness slathered over personal contempt. Why is she here? Why is she _here?_ "Why to see _you,_ silly." And she giggles, high and foolish. His flinch is full body. She's not an idiot, how _dare_ he.

And this isn't the welcome she expected, this isn't the welcome he'd promised her once. _Show up at my door, let me show you _– **bullshit**. God, this is _New Orleans_. She walked through the door of this petty kingdom with its nightclubs and its swamps, heart swelling with excitement and bitter-sweet nostalgia for the things that could never be hers, thank _god_. This was a Kingdom where her name had never been spoken, a Kingdom she did not help build, something that she had never been party to. What a _feeling._

Yet, it's Klaus acting cagey, like he knows she's not here to stay, like maybe he doesn't care for convincing her otherwise either. He's a creature of impulse she knows, but he's not _all_ impulse, as much as he'd like it to seem that way. Klaus had _known_ she was going to be there that night, he'd _known_. Millennium old piece of shit that he is, there's a part of him that remembers caution when it suits him, the part that remembers his father. Showing up to a party unannounced was his style. Just any party though? Not so much.

She doesn't know if he came to see her or to torment her, whether he _meant_ to break his promise or not. She doesn't know what she wants the answer to be.

She only knows that she hates him, and looking at him hurts only the way the longing for home can. She only knows that he lied to her, he's lying to her now. He's betrayed her, that's the truth. Promise or no promise. It _hurts._

Klaus turns his head, sullenness tightening his jaw, his neck, his shoulders - anger that ripples through his whole body and holds it there, buzzing beneath his skin, blood swarming in his veins, she can taste it. Still as a live wire.

The evening moves low through the windows, gaining on them little by little as she waits and he delays. About fucking turn, right?

She drops her smile and folds her arms, she's managed to chasten him, slapped him in the face with that one.

There's a measly coffee table between them and fanciful cutlery she'd give anything to fling into his face. She had put continents between them, and it's ridiculous really, isn't it? All that trouble she went through. He wasn't chasing her at all. He didn't _want _her.

The heat ebbs away from her, light dimming as the evening falls, but she still feels on fire, still has the noon and the hybrid venom scorching in her blood, his lips in her hair, his teeth in her throat. She's felt on fire since Vienna, she's been beating herself up, eating herself alive. She doesn't deserve that. She doesn't deserve to be haunted by a boy who didn't call for her, who more or less lied to her, who took a coward's way out, who might not love her anymore.

He must have thought it was funny, having her heart ram against her ribs, to taste it. Her anxiousness, fright and expectation, and then not follow through. Never speak to her. If he was her friend he might have spoken to her, but he didn't speak to her. He wasn't her friend, he wasn't her _anything._

* * *

They lied, Stefan's a _liar_. He isn't right. They lied. Love isn't love if it fractures you. That's something else, something hungry, and loud, and selfish. They shouldn't call it love. Caroline's kicked herself around for too much of her life, martyr to this romanticized _bull_shit. That if it hurt that meant it was real. That it was only real if it hurt.

It isn't _love_.

_You're free, Caroline_. He says to her, has the _gall_ to grant it. Her freedom, seriously? Tell her like it was ever his to give, like he could take _anything_ away from her? That entitled piece of _shit._

She can't sleep. She can't sleep. She can't _sleep._

* * *

The sun gutters out of the room like a match tossed into the water when Klaus looks at her.

"Caroline," He swears, damn him, damn him to hell, he's not - he's not _allowed_ to say her name, to have the syllables fit in his red mouth like a hush, to have his mouth carve around it like he's tasting psalms. Like she's oh-so-cruel to drag a confession out of him, like she's flayed him alive and sent him through hell. She has seen her fair share of hell, and he has lived without her better than she thought she could live without him. Not a word from him in _years_, nothing but a fucking promise to save him from admitting a filthy _lie_. She wants to crush his windpipe beneath her heel. She wants to see if he's still the sort of fool who'd let her. "I didn't know."

And he bites his tongue on that one and says no more.

_And what if you'd known? What then, Klaus? You wouldn't have come?_ It _sounds _like the truth, enough that questioning it will only make things more complicated. She doesn't want to think about that.

"Until you saw me?" The pain is sobering in a way, clenches her heart hard and agonizingly before it lets go. Lets go. They're finally getting somewhere. Stripping away the flesh, getting down to the ugly bones, there's no freedom without truth. Caroline takes a deep breath, posture lighter. "You followed me."

"I did."

"Part of the way. You stopped. Why?"

Klaus sits up slowly, and she raises her chin as he does, as cautious as he is. She wants to see everything in his eyes, catch it all. He tilts his head, his eyes slink right over her, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, moving slow like a heatwave, like water down a parched throat.

And the thing is that he isn't _trying_ to take her clothes off. He's trying to commit her to memory, swallow her whole. She wonders if she's being outshined by that girl in his mind, twenty years gone. If he's measuring her against a scale he'd drawn, of who he imagined she was.

It's a lie though, he hadn't imagined anything. He'd seen a golden soul, so she'd seen it too. She'd _believed._

Using his eyes on her like it'll stop her from her course. She'd thought he might, when she came here. She thought she was prepared; she's not been abstinent these past two decades, alright? She knows her way around a tall glass.

Klaus isn't just any man and that's the problem. She's gone for Hollywood A-listers, entrepreneurs, Hungarian waiters and all the like, she's had it _all._ She wasn't looking for him in them, she's not that much of a romantic – but she has a feeling that Klaus looks at her the way a man looks at only one woman. She knows he's had several, before and after her. His body is hard and cruel as it always was, all compact strength waiting to bend anything with its might, a body that hides none of its viciousness.

So he's earned his scars, won his wars, lain with women, and perhaps in his mind they have all been her.

"I was waiting."

Her arms slip out of their lock, dropping down to her sides. "What were you waiting for?"

There's a wrinkle between his brows, his features on the verge of an unhappy twist. Klaus takes a breath, and his own words agonize him, they come out so wasted and quiet and painfully regretful. "An invitation."

How much invitation did he _need?_

Caroline left her hometown. She'd traveled the world, she'd stuffed her belongings into the jaws of a suitcase, climbed the first plane – she'd never flown before, she'd been _scared_. She'd gone to see art and _music_, his name never crossed her lips. She finished university, several degrees, she'd accomplished so _much_, she was settling somewhere. She was waiting for him to break his promise.

In the room she'd left couldn't he hear how her heart drummed? _Rat-a-tat-tat_, so loud she couldn't even _think_. Didn't he realize that she'd wanted him to say something? Anything? Say it, say _something_, don't leave things undone. Close the chapter, turn the page, or burn the book, don't stroke your finger down the page and _hover_.

_Do_ something, say _something._

Her fingers dig into her skirts. Her wardrobe had been specific, as specific as she'd organized for any event, gala, soiree or board meeting. She'd worn something pretty, elegant. Something that made her feel good, she wanted to look beautiful cutting his tongue out, she wanted to be red hot angry, but cool and vengeful too. It's all just skin though, just paper.

Caroline - she's so _angry_, feels so thwarted her eyes actually tear up a little. This can't be healthy. "An invitation," She repeats back to him, so outraged she can't manage a tone above low and utterly _thrown_. What did you want me to do? Turn around and _call_ for you, and tell you that I _needed_ you? You wanted me to run back to you and tell you how sorry I was, how I was now ready for this magnificent world, to experience it? With _you?_ So you could feel wise and tell me, _I told you so?_ You think I could speak to you after _everything?_ "You broke your promise."

"I didn't mean to." How much like a child he looked, how much like herself. A strain to his jaw, his palms pressed to his knees, the grind of sinew in his arms rigid, the sullen red sulk of his mouth when he lies. And he _is _lying, she is sure.

"You meant to." He broke the first one with the second, and he broke the second when he arrived to eat her heart out simply by breathing in the same room.

He isn't giving anything away, she has never seen him so withdrawn. Silently deliberating. It's not right for him to seem such a stranger, and she feels wildly out of her depth. Where was the flash of fire? "Maybe. Why are you here, Caroline?"

He kept asking her that, _he kept asking her that_. If he'd been keeping tabs on her he'd have known. It's like he wants her to leave.

That hurts more than she admits, but that's just vanity, she can - she'll get over it. Klaus hasn't been keeping tabs on her, not like Elena thinks, Klaus hasn't been thinking about where she's been, what she's doing, he hasn't been protecting her or loving her from afar like some mysterious benefactor, aware of all that she does. Her face flames, her prides taken another hit. Caroline's a fool, but she's not _stupid_-stupid, she's not going to _hate_ herself. Certainly when she doesn't plan on seeing him again.

But didn't he know? Didn't he _know_ that before he met her it was like everyone else was speaking an entirely different language, like everyone else was moving through an entirely different world, and only he - _he_ was the only one who'd known her word for his own?

Pride had stopped her from telling him before.

The world washed in. Silence, silence - _silence_ is the deserved thing, the most accurate thing now.

She doesn't stop for even a second to think, _I shouldn't have come_. She doesn't think, _I wish I never loved you._ She doesn't want to say she traveled the world to get away from him, because it's a _lie._ She traveled the world, made the most colorful, adventurous trail to give chase to.

_She traveled the world so she could prove he never loved her._

Klaus feels no obligation to make sense to her, explanations are an admission of defeat. And it's terrible - but if something has to die then it's time she sees it into the grave, time she buries it.

For so long parts of her had lain, rested, content – the other parts though, had held their breath, laid in wait, wait – wait – _waiting_ for him, waiting for something _magnificent_ to happen, some explosion of motion rising up from the water, a whirlwind of seagulls, the cry of a wolf before the pack came thundering through the village. And she was so close now, so close to the Death.

She'll get over this. She's bounced back from so much more before, Caroline _will_ get over it.

"I'll cut to the chase," She smoothes her hands over her abdomen; she looks up at the ceiling, hoping that the back of her eyes stop itching. It's not yet time for tears. She can have a long self indulgent cry on the trip back before she never thinks about him again. "I wonder if I can request something, for old time's sake."

"For old time's sake?" He starts, mouth derisive, challenging, as subtle as the sheen of venom on a blade. "That's all you came to New Orleans for?"

"I have a _request_."

His knuckles crack at his side, his smile a mirthless curve. "Have you?"

Caroline spins him one of her own smiles, tight at the corners, floating where his sinks. It's battle high, almost. They've reached the finish line, it's almost time to kick off her shoes and walk away. There's something sweet about it, like a mouthful of her own blood.

"I'll tell you what I want," she tells him softly with that pretty mouth made for more than just kisses, moving a different way from his when _he_ said the words. Moving over the syllables like they're feathers on her lips, light on tender, bruised flesh. And It's a bitter, bitter spill. "I want your confession. I want you to tell me you never loved me."

* * *

And she thinks of Stefan, that lousy fool. Stefan and his beautiful girls, and his stupid dopey, drunk smile - Stefan and his nasty way of grinning at people who comment about his pick of women. Stefan who doesn't ever say Elena's name, but manages to love how his girls mangle his. Stefan who hasn't talked to Damon since he left, who looks into swarming cities, lounges in crowded airports like a man placed out of time, better suited to a dusky bar with the neck of a broken bottle swinging easy in his grip.

Stefan who buys more whisky than he can drink, who doesn't blink when he catches silvery straight blonde hair in the swarm of those cities, who instead talks about Nostradamus and Al Capone in the same sentence, in the same bored irreverent drawl.

Stefan saying all the right things, all the things other people wrote about, things he's experienced and things he hasn't, things he shamelessly airlifts out of the stupid literature he keeps beneath the chaise lounge. Stefan saying and knowing and _believing_, Stefan who's always, _always _right.

Stefan smiling jagged, the faintest breath on his lips. _Love isn't brains, Caroline –_

_It's blood._

* * *

"No."

Her heart stops. The oxygen and blood production, halts. There's a finality to that, he thinks.

Caroline won't allow him that. Even if his face looks like thunder, a building wrath. Even if he's going to stand and blow the roof off the house, it's nothing compared to the murder of the crawling years, dragging her into the pits of hell, sleepless with vexation. His eyes take her apart like a buck knife, obstinate and cruel.

Caroline purses her lips, "I didn't come here for theatrics, Klaus. I didn't come here to shout at you, or hate you, or trick you, or start anything. I only want it to end."

"Of course not," Klaus chest swells, rising back, posture alert and dangerous. Sarcasm bubbles in him like acid, set to detonate everything he has so closely kept packed, kept secret. His composure, she begins to realize, might be just as much a facade as hers. "You want me to speak lines you've written for me."

She rises abruptly to her feet, sweeping up her purse with her. Klaus follows, except when he stands she really does expect the walls to bowl over, and the table to fly. The gap between them grows traitorous and narrow. Caroline's heart doesn't skip a beat, it straight up _stops_. He's angry, furious – has as little right to that as she had when she'd found out he was off in New Orleans becoming some murdering bitch's baby daddy.

"I want you to tell me the truth." Caroline says gently, adjusting the clasp minimally before she looks up at him again. She's not dealing with Klaus the man who might have laid waste to the world for her, she's talking to a disagreeable client, an obstinate buyer. Firm, without rudeness. That would be unfortunately unprofessional. "This is all terribly awkward if left unresolved, you must admit. Perhaps once this is all over we won't have to dance around each other and we can be friends again. Friends who never meet, who knew each other once, a very long time ago. How about it?"

"I don't want to be your friend."

Like an elevator with a snapped cord, she feels her whole body suddenly plummet. He doesn't fall for her sales pitch. Not like he fell for everything else. But it comes out of him low and mean, like a throat-full of jagged gravel ready to massacre her with her name, and entirely too certain than she is comfortable with. Whether or not he loves her, or ever did...the confirmation of his desire for her, that it still bears long till now…

He has his hands curled by his sides, tension twists in him. It springs between his brows, holds, quivering like a locked arrow. It drags hard along his cheekbones, clenching in his jaw, and Klaus wants her. He wants her _unreasonably._

She can barely keep the heat out of her face, the thrum of blood as it burns in her veins, Klaus doesn't want to be her friend. _Never _her friend. There's a table between them, the night falling through the windows, and the same confused, heady heat that she won't let fog her brain up.

It's miraculous that Caroline manages to steer away from that tangle elegantly, "An acquaintance then."

Klaus squares his shoulders, feet braced, and if she reaches for him she's sure the air around him will burn her hands right off. God save the King of New Orleans, high up on his throne, the swamp at his feet, trying to own her too.

"I know," she says patiently, soothing almost. It's bizarre. "I know you promised. You said I was free but I think I'll go crazy if I don't get _some_ closure." She smiles at him, to soften it further. Less like she's confessing her needless heartbreak to wound him, and more of the mutual benefit and respect that might come with clearing the air. And she's that girl again, wearing a winning grin, coaxing red solo cups into Elena's pale hands, so pale, like there wasn't enough blood in her- sure your parents died a few months ago, I'm sorry, but the broody new boy wants you. Lighten _up._ "Last time doesn't count. Real closure, you know? New age word, you must have come across it somewhere. But, anyway...I think you can agree it's the least we deserve from each other."

She's been nothing but open with him, even if it's from under a veneer of calm. Damn it, he can give her that much at least, her pretend airs. If she's going to cut away a piece of herself she doesn't want to make a mess, _cruelest cool for the cleanest cut_.

It feels like something Katherine would say and really, apples and trees. But Katherine had also been something else in this poor mimicry of Eden of course, coiled around a branch.

He doesn't have the right to look so wounded, like a beast hit over the head with a bat. Uncomprehending, shocked, just turning wild. He's the one who stuck the knife in her.

Caroline sweeps a hand over her purse, shrugging a little. "Really, it's not all that complicated."

"I haven't seen you in years, Caroline." He surprises her. And it's like slipping on an old skin, the fit is almost perfect. Grin curving, wolf grin white. Adopting the old easiness in his limbs, it's like warping back a hundred years when she thought he actually _respected_ her. That lazy boyish grin, not entirely harmless – sure to stun a thousand hearts.

It's a distraction so transparent it's audacious. It's audacious too, how her heart responds, waiting and wanting to melt into the furrows of him, furrows he'd let her leave so long ago. Like if he says her name enough, and grins _just_ so, maybe she'll let him buy her a drink and take her a turn about the floor. Maybe they'll leave this messy topic behind.

It comes under the guise of a compromise, but compromise doesn't come easy to Klaus. Steering her away so he doesn't have to admit a weakness, or a lie.

The fit is almost perfect. Almost. Fits him like an old jacket, and she's the jacket in this analogy isn't she? Drawn off, too stuffy, fit real saucy years ago – not enough to serve now except for fond reminder. _If you thought of me half as much as I thought about you, you wouldn't look so rested, so clean and calm._

"You saw to that.

It crumples off him, that smile. Falls away like design. "You think I orchestrated that day in the woods?"

She laughs, she can't _help _it. A giggle barely stifled by her lips thinning. How he can wield such straight-faced accusation in his voice! It must be nice, to be so rested, so clean and calm. "Without a doubt, you knew I wouldn't forgive you."

"And have you come here, Caroline Forbes, to forgive me?"

He opens his arms, haughty of whatever she might stick in him, sure, sharp, vicious. Like he has known all adversaries, and he challenges his own saving, his death. Like he could not care, and his eyes have a cold light. The coldest light. She almost _buys _it. The corners of his eyes though, fold like rifts through paper, a glimpse only of his endless age that the man above won't give entirely away. It feels like a quivering, the way false bravery quivers. And she knows that her forgiveness, madly enough, is something that he still values.

She looks at him, held indignant, in awe, at the contradictions of him– she wonders how long he'll hold that posture before he starts to feel ridiculous. She could have thought him the cruelest king in the world, she could have thought he forgot about her, but Klaus is all theatrics – all pomp and bluster, as if that might hide everything from her

Caroline has sharp eyes and what she sees enrages her. Flints in the binds of her veins and starts as suddenly as a forest fire. She is awash in this flood of inarticulate anger and disappointment. He wants her forgiveness, _only he will not ask for it._ He wants her to cut him, he wants to draw her out.

There are things that the body doesn't forget, even when the heart pretends to sleep and shut its ears. He remembers the quickness, the snip and slice of her, her righteousness sluicing him naked. He does not adore her cool airs, for the quieter a rage, the less it can forgive. Caroline Forbes wants to cast him out, same as he cast her out – she wants to exorcise him from her. And even the inkling, the mere intangible suggestion that he has somehow got his hooks in her…to him it's as delicious and impossible as salvation.

She _wants_ to understand him. She always thought she could manage that, at the very least. _We're the same, Caroline_. He'd spoken, and it rang through her forever after, like one of those great Gongs they bang in the Himalayas, beating through the core of mountains.

He's not sorry, he wants her forgiveness. It's enough to make her head spin. "I got over it."

Doesn't he get it? He thinks she cares because he fucked Hayley? She did, at first – because Klaus talked a good game about wanting her, but suddenly? She cares mostly because that was the _one_ kind of about turn she _didn't_ expect from him, chasing her boyfriend out of town and not only exempting her boyfriend's accomplice from the same punishment but taking it further and sleazing it up with the very same bitch who tried to kill him – it's hypocrisy of the highest order. She didn't understand it from him then, she doesn't understand it from him now. It made him seem lesser to her, this grievous error. Like she'd painted him all wrong in her head.

All those doors he promised to throw open to her, he'd slammed shut. Made it seem like it was all her idea. Which _fine_, she doesn't blame him for nipping it in the bud, and you know – breaking things _off,_ because at some point he'd have to realize that she was never going to go away with him, _ever_.

But he'd sort of promised to _linger_, proclamations of last love and all – and she was sure that in time she wouldn't have gone off with him, baby or no baby, New Orleans or Paris, she couldn't _imagine_ relying on him so entirely. And you know what, nice save, totally right. Right on all the worst things. And it's like he's robbed her, to be quite honest. Because she'd imagined him more relentless than he was, she imagined him, _more._

Mostly she cares that he didn't tell her the whole story, like she was just some stupid bitch he'd picked up on the side of whatever one pony town he'd be pillaging through that week instead of the girl he'd made her _feel _like she was.

And what do you know? He's tossed away the jacket, but she flows into the furrows he let her leave in him once. And there's not enough white lace in the world to stop the seventeen year old cheerleader growing up in her again, springing awake, spreading out underneath her skin, larger than life, her veneer stretched taught over where she pushes. But she doesn't abandon herself, just like Klaus with his jacket remains sufficiently self-aware – it fits, only almost. She's immortal, she's also seventeen, that girl again, except _more_ where he is _less_, no use swallowing the fire, let it spark in her eyes.

And she puts a foot forward, all her weight on it. Less elegance, more boldness, she'll rip her skirt in two so she can kick him better if she wants, damn him to hell. "Every single word you use to stall me is another declaration for how little you respect me, if you ever did. Say it."

"What difference does it make?"

Oh, it stings. Like a slap. "All the difference."

"Will it make you sleep at night?" His arms fall back to his sides, shoulder's sunk, grand posture undercut. "Will you forget?"

She hasn't forgotten for _years_, "I missed you."

His eyes are wide, she's stopped his heart, somehow. She doesn't tell him like she's waiting for an answer. It doesn't froth up like a curse, bolt right out of her like a bullet. It's flat as the truth, inelegant, fully meant. Something he always tries to bend out of shape, to paint rings and roses around, and spin to a tune, something he always _ruins_ in reinvention. It's the truth. Helplessly honest, it's the truth no one can do anything about. An admittance rather than a confession, of the weather, of the world news, and all the constellations falling out of place.

"I didn't come here for you, I came here for me." She explains softly, tries to. Her life is one unrepentantly huge cliché right now. "Because I'll be damned if you have the last word on this – " Caroline takes in a gulp of air, but nothing quenches the heat of her anger. Jagged cut throat questions, carefully caught regrets – no more, _no more_. "How _dare_ you fuck me when you had a baby on the way. What is _wrong_ with you? Was that just something you thought okay to omit? Oh, but hey you're going to New Orleans so might as well fill her up for old times sake, right? I _liked_ you, I thought at the very least that you were my friend, that you might actually respect me. _I_ respected you – I thought for the first fucking time in my life I found someone I could like and still respect myself doing it. But you weren't at all what I thought you were! You weren't constant, infallible, invincible, which fine – we're all fucking human. But you made a fool out of me. I hated myself for so long, because again, they were all right about you! Jesus, you're a piece of shit, Klaus! You're a fucking coward. You didn't speak to me because you're a _coward_. And yeah," Caroline explains calmly, the fire lays low, banked beneath her words like it never was. "You didn't _force_ me to fuck you, you didn't force me to send you away but you made me feel real stupid after. And in Vienna…I felt like the stupidest person you'd ever fooled, I felt _fooled_. I feel like you opened me up somehow, and you took something away, and you did it so skillfully it felt like I'd _meant_ to give it away all along. You lied to me, you _hurt_ me. In Vienna, I remembered what feeling like shit felt like. You made a promise so you wouldn't have to lie to me, because you knew I wouldn't forgive you. I _thought_ I forgave you, or at least _forgot,_ but then I saw you again and it all came back, and how could I say a word then? What, was I supposed to just stay behind and initiate co_nversation?_ And you were important to me, I liked you, I learnt to like you – and I imagined I could like you and still respect myself. But I can't. How dare you have sex with me when you had a baby on the way! Like, what the fuck? Have you no shred of decency? You didn't speak to me then, and you didn't speak to me in Vienna because you're a coward."

"And I am exhausted of thinking about all of this," she admits, wasted and hollow from all of it "I just want to close the lid on this forever. I'm tired of wondering how you are and thinking about you, and wondering how I thought that anything you said to me could still be true. After everything."

And that's it. It's done. She's said everything. Her chest heaves, her shoulder's drop, and there isn't enough lace and make up and frills to hide her disappointment from him. She's not hiding anything anymore. She's hit by everything that she's lost. She'd thought he was deluded about her, but she'd been worse about him – and yeah, eternity's great, but it doesn't eliminate the injury of wasted time. And god, she had wasted so much time. She has wasted so much time with him, thinking him unfailing, and better than God when it came to his word. Being angry, that was human too. Breaking promises, and outgrowing love, and tenderness. Klaus is _human_. She's wasted so much time pretending he was somehow impervious, somehow more than he was, and it hadn't been fair to him maybe but he hadn't been fair to her.

She's lost so much time, and it's hitting her, her life closing up the space meant for him to drift through. That in her mind, on the quietest of nights – nights that crawled with traffic, that filtered through a curtain of off-stage noise and silence like static – in the stillest of nights, in the unmoving hinge of one second before it became the next, she could picture him. The unblinking dark of his eyes. The final rush of breath that left his lungs when he looked up at her. The sound of him like knees hitting the ground.

And he's a liar, he's a fake. But he's just a man, he's just a man, he's not made for impossible loves.

She doesn't want to punish him. He's just a man, it goes through her in an endless reel, he's just a body, just a heart, just water and ordinary blood, just atoms, just like me. He is not his word. He's just a man.

Standing in his house, with his eyes like a wound, making the decision to love the way any other flesh and blood thing would. Klaus is not God, he isn't even hers, he's not immortal – not really, not in the way she used to think. He's just older, harder to kill. He's just a man. The trappings of his house, the trappings of his silly crown that means so much to him. The uneasy glint of desperation in his eyes, the edges of him slipping and falling and failing to make him more than he is. He is not a God, not even a King. He's just a man she loves, they are just two people who have perhaps failed each other. His fingers grasp, tighten ineffectually at the air, and he cannot melt away into silver turns of phrase, or hide beneath a barb, he is just a man. Beautiful, the deliberate distance between them crumbling. He cannot defend himself, will not strike out. Klaus with his forever, reactionary bouts of rage is stilled. His eyes fall. She does not know whether it is shame or defeat or surrender, but she doesn't want to dig around for it either. Seeing him this way doesn't make her happy, it isn't what she came for. She didn't come to cowe him, or shame him. She is purging him out of her body, doesn't he know?

She's managed without tears so far, but her voice cuts on an intake of breath. Tries to be forgiving, forgiving them both. "We're different people now."

"Do you think you've changed?" He says thickly, quietly.

She feels her lips part with surprise. She'd stood there in his drawing room, taming the dragon, trying to combat the betrayal she felt with reason, with logic – and it's always a breath from deserting her. Composure is her only defense, and even that's near to drop away, breath on wet paper. A single one, she'll tear.

She understands what the question _means_. It's those eyes of his, disassembling her like a neat little trick. They unnerved her, always had. She stood there and she felt exposed, twenty years and it all comes toppling down, doesn't it? Baby vampire, the way he'd never make her feel, but the way he once wanted her, young and needing someone to roll out the red carpet for her.

It's asking a thing of her, this question - more than if she missed him. She doesn't know if he wants honesty, or if he wants to make her feel unsettled, off-balance and vulnerable. Her calmness infuriates him, just like she'd known it would, but she can't help it. Caroline can't help assuming the tone of someone levelheaded, like a lawyer come to civilly divide an estate - if she's anything _but_ civil she'll loose whatever self-control and self-respect she's earned herself.

Of course she has. The question is, has he?

_Why?_

"Not much," She admits, near exhausted. "I did adapt, and I did learn how to get by. How to become…_more_, and leave behind the parts I didn't need."

His fists uncurl, and his shoulders fall. "Am I then, a part you don't need?"

He's got it wrong. He isn't a part at all, he could have been, maybe – ages ago when she thought he meant anything he'd said. He is a stain, sticky and stubborn – the more he speaks, even now, hollow and tilted with stupid _hope_…the more he speaks the deeper he goes, the more he sticks, the more he grows.

He's the bloodstain on the upholstery of her life. The crude mark in the neatness of it, the slant disturbing the symmetry, the fault in the structure. Without the truth she can't love him, and with it she won't leave with him. He's like Mystic Falls to her, doused in the alchemy of memory, her golden boy kissing her gently, like her teeth could cut him. She can't do anything with him, like nostalgia, he is useless to her. She can't walk back into his arms because she won't be able to walk out, Klaus wants (or wanted) her eternity, she's too selfish to give him that. She's got too much to do, too much to see, and too much self-_respect_.

He was pain, a bullet wound, a festering rot – even when the limb was removed, phantom electric ghost, it demanded to be felt.

She doesn't think she'll ever need Klaus. It doesn't mean she doesn't love him. And loving him doesn't mean she'll forgive him. And forgiving him will_ never_ make her stay.

"What I need is for you to say the words."

The color of his eyes could scorch the words out of her for years. Could render her silent, mute – no one has ever looked at her like that, _no one will ever look at her like that again_. "You never cared for my words."

It's a blow that lands, her insides shrivel in mortification, in shame, in spite of herself. She isn't sorry for treating him the way he did, all things considering it was no more than he deserved. Caroline sighs, breath billowing grievously out of her lungs. She understands the tactic, the more she talks to Klaus the more he'll keep her chasing her own tail. Her hand rises to rub at her temples but halts halfway, slapping back to her sides. God, she can't do anything professionally around him. It's ridiculous.

"I care that you think I'm stupid, though. Come on, pretend that you didn't. Pretend that promising never to come back had nothing to do with you becoming a baby daddy, which – " Caroline raises a palm, exhausted - preemptively halting whatever indignant proclamations he might utter before he does her the _insult_ of uttering them. "isn't what this is about. Congratulations and all, twenty years late. Really." And she _is_ sincere, she has nothing against a baby, nothing against her mother either- all her Hayley related qualms stem from Klaus's own hypocrisy – wasn't her fault she got knocked up. "Sorry, I didn't really feel like calling to tell you that, and an email would have fallen short - But forgive me for not wanting to talk to you after I found out you'd basically fuck me without telling me about your honey on the side, and never need to explain yourself. I'd rather just hear about you courting me being about getting in my pants, rather than about actually meaning anything you said – because at least then we can both agree that you're a piece of shit. You never loved me, you never respected me, and I don't have to think about you anymore. Admit it. There's only one other alternative, and that's worse."

Klaus is serious eyes and granite jaw. "You wanted me to leave you alone."

Caroline clenches her fists, a groan lodged behind her teeth. "I wanted you to be honest with me."

"I never lied to you, Caroline. I won't lie to you now."

"Oh no," Caroline agrees wholeheartedly. "A lie's too easy to get caught in. When you speak it, it'll trip you. You were too much of a coward for that. You and your honorable word. Letting me go, pretending at benevolence," Caroline seethes, "You're a coward, you're a liar. All this time I thought about you, you know. I felt grateful, I felt sorry for you. I felt like such a fool. You have no idea - "She breathes in sharply, blinks, "Say it."

"I can't."

He won't.

Caroline gives her eyes to the ceiling, to heaven, to whoever had the sick sense of humor to place her in the same room with him again. To give her twenty years of fitful peace, building to a clash of desperate yearning and enormously wounded pride in a mere _week_, she didn't even give a shit about Klaus until she saw him again. Or at least, _actively._

And he _won't._ This is what it is to be denied. Wow, sucks. Sucks fucking _balls_. Her eyes sting, more from exasperation than rage – god, she's been angry since she last saw him. Caroline cannot _believe_ this guy. She blinks at him, astonished, stunned – the inside of her cheek between her teeth. Last time she was this disappointed, _this_ full of heartache was when she was eight, sitting on the bottom stair watching daddy swing out into the midday with a sports bag full of clothes. He'd been leaving them then, leaving her, for Steven.

"Wow." She whispers, and it's not even wrath, it's not even indignation. It's just pure, gut-blazing, shock. At herself, at him. Wow. If someone told her she'd be standing in Klaus's pompous mansion saying that one numb word, all breath – she'd have really – just…_wow._ She's shocked at how utterly she isn't surprised at all. Klaus just _stands_ there.

Klaus is beautiful, and he is so fucking _useless_. What she feels or does not feel for him is _useless_. He looks at her with the hoarse look of a man whose chest is full of fire, full of death – like it's swimming around his ears, like she's the one repeatedly stabbing him in the chest. Like she's shot him. She is so _disappointed_ in him. In herself. Because he'd gone of and proved himself just as human and stupid and mercurially inconstant as anyone else. What's worse is that he still loves her, apparently. And that's another useless thing._ Love_ is useless. It's useless to the both of them – because someone wrote down somewhere that the only measure of love that could exist was sacrifice. There is nothing Caroline will sacrifice for him. And Klaus should lie to her, if he loved her – love or no love, he doesn't respect her either way – but if he lied to her. If he said, _yes, you're right. I **never **loved you_. She'd have left this whole shindig a little less brittle maybe, falsely whole and enough duct tape for the both of them. But Klaus says he can't. He can. He _should_. He won't. Klaus won't sacrifice the truth for her. And love is sacrifice.

Fuck love, fuck him. Fuck whoever she thought he was.

And here they are, none of them budging.

"What do you _gain_ from all of this?" Her face twists, her own voice beginning to rise. "We both know I'm after peace of mind, what the hell do you get? You haven't tried contacting me for the past twenty years, why the fuck can't you just be like, _fine._ Just let this fucking end. Regardless of whether you love me or don't, it seems deluded to think you can still gain anything from it. I'm not coming back here. I'm not going to come back here and take you up on that offer. Why are you holding out on me? Why the fuck won't you just say it?"

"Caroline," Hard eyes, granite jaw still. "_No_."

"Good God, Klaus! What? Is that all you can say? Caroline, and no? Caroline, Caroline – I thought at the very least I could forgive you enough to be pleasant, but it's like you're evading every opportunity for civility I give you. It's like you want me to be angry at you forever. I'm not that resentful, I'm not Katherine, and I won't hold a grudge so long that it poisons me," And you know what, fuck _this_. Fuck this shit absolutely. First he walks into the room like he couldn't give a shit, now he refuses to admit it. Saying one thing and then another, and it's giving her fucking whiplash. _Ugh_, she turns her back on him. Fuck this absolutely, she clicks away from him. "And I'm not you. I'm going to go home, I'm going to forget you. If I can forget you maybe forgiving won't be so hard."

"All this because I didn't call after you at a little soiree?" His teeth grind, tension crackling off his body. "Because I didn't leap to my feet to engage you?"

Oh _hell_ no.

Caroline's steps click two times from the fireplace, and she is suddenly so much taller than he remembers. But that is _impossible_. "Don't you dare," she warns, murderous. "Don't you _dare_ try to make me seem like a fickle little girl. I'm not your sister and I'm under no obligation to forgive it."

Klaus tries to slip that wolf skin back on, the air between them like a furnace blast. If he tries to kiss her, if he tries to touch her, she's going to rip his fucking _eyes_ out. He's just a man, she's just a woman – but she's got just enough as much pride as he does, just as much broiling heart, with teeth just as sharp. "Man, I fucking hate you."

"You wouldn't be here if you did."

"No," She agrees, ruthless. "I suppose I wouldn't be."

And then, "Stay."

No one else will ever look at her like that again, she remembers. Good. She's got enough problems as it is. Caroline smiles and leans in just a little, resists the urge to smooth his shirt with the palm of her hand. She's gone twenty years without touching him, she can manage eternity, can't she? "I will never speak to you again, Niklaus Mikaelson." She tells him, feeling angry and not forgiving him, and sounding absurdly fond too, somehow. "We won't look for each other. I do not want to see you, I do not want your tokens or your regard or your kingdom. One day you can meet me, if you want. One day you can be honest with me. There is a whole world out there, and I have never waited for you to give it to me. None of anything that's happened here today has changed anything, none of it had the power to change anything – I will never belong to you."

"Good night, Caroline," He says.

She smiles lazily, correcting him. "Good bye."

She turns from him, leaving him again. One step in front of the other, there you go, it's instantly easier after the first. Her heels clicking infinitesimally on his floorboards, his breath leaving in him, emptying his lungs in a final rush. He doesn't stop her this time either, but he asks, in spite of himself. Calls after her like he didn't last night in Vienna, brimming brimming brimming."Where're you going?"

Caroline doesn't miss a step, skip a beat, she's efficient, leaving him. One day Klaus will be smart enough to understand. "Back."

* * *

She changes, just a little. Nothing so drastic as the way her heart shifted into place and stuck there, on him. Caroline enjoyed reading.

It's not so much Stefan's influence, all _he_ reads is soppy Victorian Poetry or Richard Sikken and the old penny westerns young kids in the thirties used to so enjoy. Caroline reads newspapers, finger on the pulse of the market, the global state of affairs, if this hidden world of theirs was showing any sign of coming to the fore. Caroline reads the classics, Pushkin and Achebe. Sometimes she reads comic books and Pygmalion, crappy Mills and Boons and badly written crime novellas, smiling with paper cracking under her nails.

Mostly she prefers the autobiographies, the hard-boiled, pitilessly factual books. Stefan keeps to his moony poetry. To Caroline there was nothing so satisfying as the turn of the page, the swift snap of the last, the end of a chapter. It's interesting how he can ruminate for years on _the hollow men_, and she can tuck the diary of Anne Frank neatly back into shelf and think no more of it. Is she terrible? She doesn't try to hide it, but somehow she always manages to hide it better than Stefan does.

She tried to read John Green once, _tried_. In that beach house where the Peruvian girls had slowly begun to live with Stefan and she'd just been dropping by for a little R&R. Stefan had given her a filthy, boozy look before her paperback vanished entirely. Four months later in the midst of spring cleaning she'd found her lost copy of the Fault in our Stars under the sink with the rest of the toilet paper.

"When are you coming back?"

Caroline pauses, unsure. His breath comes even, relaxed through the phone. "Not now."

"...Everything alright, Care?"

He sounds drowsy, like he's slowly sitting up in the warm sunlight, gently disentangling himself from a nest of happy bodies. Caroline rubs the dial on the armrest of her window seat. _Is_ everything alright? "I'm going to see."

"See? See _what_, Caroline?" Stefan laughs, a startled bark. It's must already dawning on him, he just doesn't want to believe it. "Where're you off to?"

There is a silence, that holds and holds and holds. She can see exactly what's rushing through his head, the tightening of his throat, the stricken eyes, the way he might have gotten if she'd have uttered the E-word. If not now, then when? It doesn't matter, there is love and love between them, but he will not follow her there. Not there.

"_Why?"_

Poetry doesn't flow him like it usually does, like blood from an immortal wound. The question is small, _Stefan_ sounds small. Broken, hoarse, betrayal like a rusted knife hedging out of him. Misshapen, crude, and utterly indefensible. She's unearthed a hidden grave, reminded him of that empty church of a girl, those sacred killing fields that tore him apart a hundred times over. Once he was a boy, a _boy_. God, what is this raw, mutilated thing? This mangled heart she unearths. There is only so much liquor in the world, only so much poetry, only so many books, only so many girls. So many towns, so many heady cities and their lights ripping the night, and music, music, and girls, and beach-houses and _terrible_ coffee. Why there? _Why go back?_

It is a very intimate sort of shame, a grief, knowing that everyone knows where your body is buried. And it is a trespass now, the only one she has dared make. She has learnt about the heart. The heart is a killing thing, and Stefan walks around the world enlightened, half-dead.

They never talk about that place - about the people in it, not so directly. They don't ever talk about that corpse of a place, that hidden grave, that empty church of a girl, those sacred killing fields that tore him apart a hundred, thousand times over.

"It's home," Caroline flinches, feeling her grip sure on the hilt of that knife. Helpless. His deadened eyes, her savage twist. "It's home."

* * *

In the garden a woman snips off lilacs.

It is April, a wetness to the ground from the soft spring rain of last night. They will do well with the vase on the window sill, the lilacs. When the season is done she still has enough to press into books, enough so every day her daughter leaves the house there are glossy petals, or dry delicate stems folded into the hem of her coat, into the back of her shoe. In April when the lilacs bloom fresh her daughter wears it in her hair. Protection, exorcism, blessings, a reminder of past lives and the gift of life given.

Then she rises, her belly rounded with child.

Caroline's throat feels like it's tearing from the inside-out, and Bonnie holds out her hand to her, fingers deft and elegant around the freshest bloom.

* * *

Caroline reads, short shorts and leg hooked over the swinging chair on the porch back home. Not really home, though. It's Mystic Falls, a family of Fells have moved in, they pay rent to Sheriff Donovan.

Caroline tries to read. The Salvatore boarding house has seen better days, the sides of the stonework licked black from old fires. No one wanted to rent the place, too much death. Caroline licks her finger, page 198. drifting to 199. Death's inescapable, it'll find her if it has to, _so._

Damon's sex mansion isn't home, but it's the only place in town with it's own well system. The town's water plant is stocked full of enough vervain to make her skin melt off her bones. Caroline enjoys reading and she also enjoys poison-free showers.

In the evening she goes to Bonnie's for tea. Her friend doesn't look a day over twenty five, her fifteen year old daughter necks around the kitchen doorway, eavesdropping. She's a startling beautiful girl, with her mother's dusty green eyes. Caroline can see the spark in her, like fireworks in her dark hair, the magic _sizzling_ -

"I'm glad you're back," Bonnie's eyes had had a shine in them, words caught on emotion when she'd embraced her.

Mystic Falls has two Sheriffs. Bonnie might not have a shiny badge, but there is a beauty of youth, a removed-quality to her that is normally lent to a different sort of authority. No one says the word 'witch' out loud but Mystic Falls knows a thing or two about seeing and keeping mum. Whether she's really a witch or not, Bonnie has a seat on the council and there hasn't been an animal attack or a trashy-sexy Salvatore in Mystic Falls for twenty years.

So maybe she picks lilacs, and maybe she coaxes up nightshade, wolfs-bane and vervain. Maybe every Wednesday Matt Donovan has coffee with Bonnie Bennet at the Grille, just like they had when they were kids, and sometimes the odd strange word crops up, words like 'vampire' and 'succubis'. It doesn't matter, Mystic Falls is a strange place but it is a safe place now, and there's a strange sort of patriotism about their weird occurrences, a pride in being the weirdest fucking town this side of America.

Every Summer Fair Bonnie Bennet wins the Apple Pie contest and everyone eats it up with a serving of ice cream.

"How long are you going to stay for?" Bonnie cups her mug with both hands. It reminds Caroline of evenings long ago, hot chocolate, marshmallows and Elena's tinkling laughter.

Every supernatural creature that thinks of making a stop in Mystic Falls has to visit its Protector to be deemed worthy of having. "I don't know," Caroline admits, shrugging. "Is it okay if I stay?"

"Of course it's okay if you stay," Bonnie frowns, examining her previous statement. She hadn't intended for it to sound like _that_, but now that Caroline's brought it _up_..."As long as you follow the rules, of course."

"Bonnie Bennet, you uptight prude," Caroline sighs, the endearment tired, half fondness, half recitation. "Alright. What?"

Don't touch anyone. Brings your own blood bags or pay for them. Everyone's on vervain, in fact Mystic Falls has a famous herbal ice tea, no other town in the State has tasted anything like it. Don't kill. Never kill. _Take an eye, I'll saw off both arms._

Bonnie blows on her tea, lavender and honey. The smile playing around her mouth entirely genial. "Don't get lost." She says instead, "On Friday you're going to have dinner with the family."

And then Bonnie starts to bitch about the new Starbucks that's opened two streets down from the Grille, and her daughter, Sylvia barrels in - hiding forgotten, not even hiding the fact that she was eavesdropping (badly), to defend the youth's need, desire and demand for caramel fruppaccinos and a place that isn't falling apart from three explosions, shoddy reconstruction, and smelling of old people. _Someone should demolish that balls-old wood cabin masquerading as an actual public space. I swear, when are you going to make Mr. Saltzman get off his lazy ass and finally scrub the ceiling. I tell you this every year, mom. There are bloodstains on it. Bloodstains!_

* * *

Caroline meanders in Mystic Falls, wears huge shades and unremarkable hoodies when she ventures into town. If anyone recognizes her as the old Sheriff's daughter then no one mentions it, and she's considerate enough not to make it obvious. Kind of an open secret, Mystic Falls.

It's a holiday she hasn't taken in a while, her personal assistant in Florida knows to keep things running without her. The world won't fall apart if she leaves it alone sometimes, Caroline learnt that lesson after two decades. The bartender doesn't card her for whiskey, her age something he knows not to discuss. Bottled water and alcohol, it's the only things she can drink in her hometown that won't kill her. She has to drive out town to replenish her blood bags, doesn't mind it either. She's thankful for it. It's safer a town than it's ever been, less ignorant, more aware, ready to take cues from a leadership that knows what it's doing.

Caroline doesn't even like whiskey, but she likes the smell sometimes. It reminds her of autumn with Stefan when he wasn't Hamlet-ing all over the place.

Her ears prick around a familiar voice, that depth and timbre undeniable to her. Caroline perks up, alert - his back's turned to her, he's speaking to one of the waitresses, his fingers hooked into his belt, warm and confident. Matt's always been warm really, she's seen him defiant and hurt and mean, but she's never seen him _sure_. The uniform suites him. So much.

Her throat goes dry, she licks her lips. "Hey, Sheriff!"

He turns, distracted and she knows her voice pitches him headlong the same way his does her. And damn, Matt - _Matt_, it knocks her dizzy, he's the first boy she ever loved, you know? And a girl doesn't forget, she _never_ forgets. His eyes widen, there're lines around them now, lines that can't be put there, only grown. "Caroline?" He gasps, shallow. And she waits an eternal moment, pitched, still in midair waiting to see if he'll smile at her, if he won't. But he does, Matt's face breaks around a warm, surprised grin. Her insides warm, her mouth cracks.

Matt isn't her boyfriend, he isn't her sweetheart, and he'd been nine levels of asshole about her being a vampire when he'd found out. Nostalgie, sentiment, all these things can maybe forgive him more than she should. Matt...she doesn't doubt that he's definitely the star of Mystic Falls'arsenal of hot dads. He's different, she cocks her glass at him, her fingers shake.

The sight of him does strange, shivery things to her. He's old. Seeing Bonnie had been one thing, that girl had probably been swimming in milk for the last twenty years - but Matt has _laughter_ lines, has frown lines, has a little star splatter of grey in his golden hair and a body that moves like it knows where it's going.

When he lays his hand on the bar, leaning amicably to give her a side armed hug she sees a scar spanning silvery and strange from wrist to forearm, standing out like moonlight against the rest of his sunkissed skin. It's what makes her clutch at him suddenly. She doesn't get up from her seat because she doesn't think she can hold herself upright, or make Matt do it for her. She hasn't let anyone do it for her for a long time. And Matt, oh _Matt_ - His laughter rumbles through him, startled, big and heavy, and makes her whole body hum. She'll probably get snot on his uniform. God, he wears it the way her mom did, like his own skin. She doesn't let go, just digs her nails in, breath shivering and lungs tight and croaking with the smell of him, the look of him, the age of him, and Matt lets her, just laughs harder, laughs that warm laugh again.

* * *

And love and time is like this. It is a pin dropped on the sleek vinyl, a new song, an old song coming out of the machine as dazzling as it was the first time. So dazzling it brings tears to the eye. That's what love is, love and time. A breath coming out of the heart, ephemeral, music - these are the old songs. _Maybe Monday, maybe not_. The words shiver through her hair, a red feather, balloons rustling around their feet - _their_ feet. Him, and his jacket under her glove.

Slow dancing to his old tunes. She does not begrudge him that this time, memory is like that, darling. You make the bitter things sweeter, sandpaper the past cruelties, deceitful but well meaning. So there is memory, and love, and time, and the man who the voice in the machine loves. The man she loves. His jacket beneath her glove, and she closes her eyes, and empties the anger and the pain out of her ribs, hollowing herself out so all that is left is simple enough not to ask any questions. Love and longing, love and memory and time, and all the lies they tell each other. The self-aware shadow play, the fond deceit. She closes her eyes and rests her temples against his solid chest, and feels his sigh, dragging through her sweet and soft as a cloud.

_Still I'm sure to meet him one day, maybe Tuesday will be ours._

And this is love, fondness that twists the memory, that encases those we love in resin, in that warm honeydew, trapping like cathedral ceilings and painted holy light. So recalling is an activity that brings gladness, that twists the heart like a rich wineskin and not like a rope. Her step following his around a stolen room, a stolen orchestra, and stolen tigerlillies, he leads a dance only in name. She knows his like how she knows her own. There's no forgetting.

When there is eternity, forgetting is like killing, worse.

There is no forgetting his palm tipping her into the doors of death, knuckle nudging, betrayal with teeth. Feeling her body waste and rot on those white sheets, his mouth moving curiously over the names of places, and there is a pause, a hang, most reverent before he reaches forward, carefully, like he knows she might strike him and - and he flicks the silver baubles on her wrist. The Eiffel tower, silver horses and the London bridge, tinkling.

The soul of him rumbles through her still.

* * *

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_**tbc**_

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End file.
